


Impossible Year

by acollectionofdaydreams



Series: Impossible Year Verse [1]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Barely s5 compliant, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, M/M, Reunions, Time Travel, coldwater-waugh family shenanigans, season 4 fix it, we're cherry picking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:27:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22536238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acollectionofdaydreams/pseuds/acollectionofdaydreams
Summary: While hiking up the Mountain of Ghosts with Alice, Eliot has a surprising encounter with someone who is about to help him change everything. This stranger sends him on a quest that travels him back a year into the past to the start of the whole Monster/Quentin/magic/Fillory mess, and he has to be the one to prevent it all from happening. Easy, right? Ha. Nothing is ever easy for them.Or, a fic in which Eliot does his very best to fix s4 along with some unexpected help.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Impossible Year Verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1621660
Comments: 69
Kudos: 176





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This idea wouldn't leave me alone. Full disclaimer, I'm not watching season 5. I'm literally cherry picking what I've heard and chosen to keep from the first few episodes and then throwing out the rest. There are no gods here, so I do what I want.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Eliot and Alice were on the way to the top of the Mountain of Ghosts when it happened. Eliot had fallen back a few feet as they walked, and he was ambushed. By what, he couldn’t fucking begin to guess, but it definitely didn’t look like a friendly questing creature. Honestly, he was kind of at the point where this might as well just happen too. It’s not like it was doing a lot to make things worse if he got mauled by some demon on this particular quest.

“Eliot!” Alice shouted.

He jolted at the sound of her voice, and the creature used his distraction to pin him to the ground, helpless. There was no fighting back, and Eliot knew it. Maybe it was just as well. So, he closed his eyes. Just as he was bracing for impact from the creature on top of him though, its head flew off with a horrifying crunching sound, followed by a _thud_ as its body was tossed to the side and connected with the ground.

He opened his eyes slowly, expecting to see Alice standing over him, somehow having defeated the horrifying thing. It wasn’t Alice though. There was a stranger in front of him holding some kind of sword. She looked to be a little younger than them with long sandy blonde hair in a braid tossed over her shoulder and a short stature. She gave Eliot a kind smile as she sheathed her sword at her side. 

“I’m glad I took the North trail this time,” she said.

She offered Eliot a calloused hand and pulled him to his feet while Alice still watched from a few yards away, a horrified look on her face. The woman was lean but deceptively strong.

“Pretty sure I’m more glad,” Eliot replied. He looked at her, “Pardon my bluntness, but it’s been a very long day. Who are you?”

The stranger laughed but not unkindly. She said, “I’m just another traveler headed up the mountain like you.”

“Right,” Eliot said.

Nothing like a vague yet helpful stranger to keep things interesting.

Her eyes flicked to Alice then back again. She asked, “Could you use some company? It’s a long walk.”

Eliot turned to Alice, who shrugged at him. He said, “As long as you’ve got that sword on you, you’re welcome to walk with us as far as you’d like.”

The woman’s face lit up in an amused smirk, and Eliot couldn’t help it because something in the quirk of her lips and the glint in her eyes looked familiar. Eerily familiar. He inexplicably trusted the strange woman. So, he simply nodded and they all continued up the slope in silence.

After awhile, the silence grew old though. Eliot had fallen a few steps behind Alice again, and the stranger fell in step with him.

“So, what business do you have on the mountain?” she asked him.

Eliot stared at the back of Alice’s head and exhaled slowly. In a low voice, he said, “We’re laying to rest a... friend.”

The word friend caught in his throat, and he swallowed around it. Quentin was his friend. It was true. Just, not the whole truth.

The stranger eyed him like she could see right through him but graciously only nodded in response.

“What about you?” Eliot asked.

She answered, “It’s a family tradition, I guess you could say, to come up here once a year on this day. It sounds silly, but there’s a story that’s been passed down for centuries that one day, when Fillory is in need of saving, a traveler will be waiting on the mountain for us who will change it all. And with everything going on lately? I kind of figured it might be soon.” 

Eliot looked at her suspiciously. It all sounded very melodramatic, but this was Fillory. Who was he to question the weird shit that went on here 300 years in the future? The woman continued with a small laugh, “To be honest, I think the details have gotten a bit lost in translation, but the point is that it’s gravely important that someone in my family line meets this man. The fate of everything depends on it.”

“Well,” Eliot said, “maybe today will be your lucky day.”

The woman smiled at him, but it looked more placating than hopeful. Eliot knew the feeling. She said, “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

They continued their slow crawl to the top of the mountain, and before long, Eliot was growing tired. He was technically healed from his axe wound, according to his last checkup with Professor Lipson, but that didn’t mean his body had recovered from nearly a year of nonstop possession. That kind of trauma left more of a bone deep tired that needed a lot more than a month to heal. Then there was the everything else of it all too, of course. The point is, he was exhausted much easier these days. So, he cleared his throat to get Alice’s attention.

“Uh, do you think we could rest here?” he asked. “Just for a minute?”

Alice stopped walking as she regarded him, and something akin to understanding passed over her eyes. She gave him what could almost be described as a small smile and nodded. 

They had reached a clearing in the trail, and there were a few scattered fallen trees around them. Alice took her place on one of the logs, and Eliot walked a few feet away to sink down onto another. The stranger stood awkwardly for a moment before choosing to follow Eliot’s lead. Alice seemed a little put off by it, but Eliot couldn’t bring himself to blame the woman. Alice did give off sort of a prickly vibe. 

When Eliot shifted on the log to make room for her, he felt the letter brush against his chest from inside his jacket. It felt like a heavy weight burning a hole in his pocket, and he still wasn’t sure why he had brought it along. Maybe he was just too afraid of leaving it lying around to be found by Margo or someone else, or maybe he still hadn’t decided what he was doing with it. He’d come so close to sending it. There was this part of him, though, that was holding back. He couldn’t even begin to ascertain why. It just felt like something was missing from his plan. Something unaccounted for.

Or maybe he was just scared, because if he sent it and it didn’t work…

He reached inside his jacket and brushed his fingers over the envelope and the magical stamp on it and closed his eyes.

“What’s that?” 

He looked up to see the stranger watching him closely. His immediate impulse was to tell the woman to fuck off and mind her own business, but she had saved Eliot’s life barely an hour ago. Perhaps his quickfire anger was being misdirected. Besides, she seemed nice enough, and Eliot found that he didn’t so much mind her company.

“It’s just a letter,” Eliot told her vaguely, “for a friend.”

“The same friend you mentioned earlier?” she asked.

Eliot paused before lowering his gaze and nodding his head. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?” he asked. “To write a letter to someone who’s already gone.”

“It isn’t,” the stranger replied. “Sometimes, it’s exactly what you need to do to get all of those feelings out.”

It was a bit more complicated than that in Eliot’s case, but he supposed the sentiment was still true.

Then Alice’s head shot up as if she’d been listening. She asked, “You wrote a letter to Quentin?”

Eliot braced himself as he met her gaze. Her shrewd glare told him that she knew this wasn’t just a grief exercise. She was all suspicion from the pinch between eyes to her clenched fists in her lap.

“It’s nothing,” Eliot told her.

She warned, “Eliot, if you’re thinking of doing something stupid once we get to the top of this mountain, I need to know right now.”

Eliot was really not in the mood for a battle of wills with Alice Quinn of all people. The woman who had built a golem to channel Q’s essence from the Underworld was the last person who needed to lecture him on desperate measures. Besides, he wasn’t even sure if he was going to send it yet. It was still just a reckless idea and one that he hadn’t even come close to working out the ramifications of.

“Wait,” the stranger said. 

They both turned to her with matching confused and irritated expressions.

“You’re Eliot?” the woman asked him. Eliot shot Alice a brief look before nodding. She continued, “And the person you wrote a letter to. His name is Quentin?”

“Yes,” Eliot answered slowly. The woman looked like she was nearly in hysterics, so he asked, “Why are you making that face?”

“Oh my gods,” she laughed. Then she held out her hand for Eliot to shake.

“My name is Jade Theodora Coldwater-Waugh,” she said, “and it is an absolute honor to meet you.”

There was a baffled and stilted silence for about three seconds before both Alice and Eliot spoke at the same time.

“What the _fuck_?”

“Wait, what?!”

Jade looked between the two of them, her expression growing more excited by the second.

“Don’t you see?!” she asked. “You’re the man I was supposed to meet! You’re Eliot Coldwater-Waugh, my ancestor who was promised to return at this very spot. Oh my gods, how could I not have seen it?”

Eliot, to put it simply, was speechless. His mouth kept opening and then closing again as he searched for anything to say, _literally anything_ that would start to make sense of this.

“Okay,” Alice said, in a measured voice, “I’m just going to say it again. What the fuck?”

“Yeah, what she said,” Eliot agreed.

Jade leaned forward then and eagerly explained, “My family was descended from Earth magicians long, long ago, and it’s always been rumored that one of them would return. The story goes that his return would be the thing that changes everything, for this world and all of the others. That’s why we come to this mountain on this day every year. We were waiting for him.” She turned to look at Eliot. “For you.”

Eliot didn’t think that she took a breath the whole time she was talking. His mind kept catching on one part of the whole thing though.

“Your last name is Coldwater-Waugh?” he asked.

Jade nodded at him.

Eliot swallowed roughly before asking, “And your middle name?”

“Theodora,” Jade answered with a proud smile. “Named after Theodore Coldwater-Waugh, who I’m guessing is your son?”

Eliot’s hand flexed at his knee, and he pursed his lips as he just let himself process that. This wasn’t possible. The mosaic timeline had been erased, bound to exist only as flashbulb memories in his mind. Quentin, Arielle, Teddy, the grandkids… all of that was gone. Wasn’t it?

“Um,” he finally said, “I think you’re going to have to explain a few things to me about. All of this.”

“Me too,” Alice added.

Eliot turned to her, and his face twisted into a pained expression.

“There’s some stuff I think Q probably never told you,” he admitted.

Alice looked hurt for a split second before she schooled her expression into something more like masked acceptance. Eliot almost felt bad. They’d all been hurt, and she didn’t deserve even more of it, no matter what he thought of her otherwise. 

“I’ll explain everything,” Jade promised, over-eager excitement still flowing into her voice. God, she was just Quentin made over, now that Eliot really looked at her. It pulled at something deep inside him. She continued, “but there are a lot of things you need to know now, and I think you probably have something that I need too.”

Eliot frowned at her. He asked, “And what’s that?”

She pointed to Eliot’s jacket.

“That letter you have in there,” she said. “It has a time traveling stamp on it, doesn’t it?”

Eliot looked down at where the letter was tucked away sheepishly and nodded.

“Eliot!” Alice exclaimed, that shocked suspicion filling her voice again.

“Look,” he said, “I was going to tell you. I just… wasn’t sure if it was going to work yet.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Jade interrupted them, “because you can’t send that letter to Quentin. That would ruin everything.”

Eliot looked up at her. 

“Who do I need to send it to then?” he asked.

Jade smiled at him. She said, “You just leave that part to me. Your job here is a lot bigger than that.”

So, Eliot listened as his great great whatever granddaughter told him everything she knew. The details had definitely been muddied through the generations, but the thread of the story was clear. Jade was right. This was going to change everything. _Eliot_ was going to change everything. If it worked.

Because what Eliot was supposed to do was go back in time, back before the time jump and the seam and back to the start of this last entire fucked up year, and he was supposed to fix it all. To stop it from ever happening, piece by piece. To put it lightly, it was a hell of a quest.

“And how am I supposed to do all of that?” he asked incredulously. “I’ve already tried asking Jane Chatwin. She won’t reset the time loop.”

Alice shot Eliot another shocked look, but he steadfastly ignored it. 

“With this,” Jade said. 

She reached into her jacket and pulled out a pocket watch. It was encased in a wooden locket and emblazoned with a ‘CW’. 

“It’s a watch,” Jade explained, “made with the bark of a 300 year old clock tree and enchanted by the dwarves. It’s programmed to take you exactly where you need to go and _only_ there.”

Eliot took it from her carefully as he ran his finger over the wooden encasement. He popped it open to see a normal looking clock ticking away inside it.

“Hang on,” Alice said. “If Eliot has a stamp that will let us send a letter to the past, then why can’t we just send it to Quentin before he goes to the seam instead of sending him back in time?”

She had a tempting point, but Eliot was starting to see that it was bigger than changing one moment. They were talking about reversing this entire clusterfuck of a situation. Quentin, magic, Fillory, all of it.

Confirming his suspicions, Jade said, “Because it’s not just Quentin’s life we have to save. There’s a lot more that Eliot needs to do when he’s in the past.”

Eliot rubbed at his temples and let out a sigh that turned into a groan somewhere in the middle. He said, “My brain hurts.”

Jade laughed and patted his back. She said, “Yeah, it’s a lot to take in.”

Eliot scrubbed his hands down his face and sat up. He pulled the letter out of his pocket and reluctantly handed it to Jade, who stuck it inside her own jacket.

“You’re sure this is going to work?” Eliot asked her. “This isn’t going to cause some kind of massive paradox that brings about the end of the world?”

Jade shrugged one shoulder unhelpfully. “The world’s already ending,” she said, “and besides, the plan was your idea. Technically.”

Eliot brought his hand to his brow as he closed his eyes and hummed. He was going to need something stronger than whatever Fillory had for the migraine he felt coming on.

“Wait, how could it be my idea if you’re the one telling me about it now?” he asked. Jade opened her mouth to answer, but Eliot shook his head and said, “Nevermind, don’t answer that because I have a different question I’d rather regret asking.” He heard Alice give an amused snort across from him.

He asked, “How are you going to know what to put in that letter if I haven’t told you yet?”

She said, “Because I’ve already written it. It was given to the clock dwarves hundreds of years ago so that they could make the watch for us, but I can get it back from them to make sure the wording is exact before I send it. They never get rid of anything.”

There were about five seconds of silence while Eliot tried to process that.

“Nope,” he shook his head and waved a hand at Jade, “That’s it. No more time nonsense. Unless you have a great deal of peyote, I don’t want you to try to explain how any of this works to me again.”

Then he added, “Oh, but High King Margo should be able to help you with the dwarves. Just tell her your last name. It’ll be fun.”

Jade raised an eyebrow at him. She asked, “You mean High King Margo who was banished 300 years ago?”

Eliot nodded, “The very one.”

Alice touched his shoulder, and he turned his head to see her standing over him.

“Eliot, um, can we talk for a minute?” she asked.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, grateful for the break from frying his brain.

He rose from his spot to follow her a few feet away, just out of earshot. She was giving him a determined look when she spun around and stopped in front of him.

“You have to do this,” she said, leaving no room for argument.

“Alice, are you sure?” he asked, “There is so much that can go wrong here.”

“Then don’t fuck it up,” she told him harshly.

He sighed as he looked at Jade then back at her.

“She’s related to you and Q, right?” she asked in a softer voice. He nodded. There was no doubting that. “Then who can we trust more than her? It’s the best plan we’ve got.”

He searched her eyes. She was right. This was their best plan, and it apparently had been 300 years in the making. Three hundred years of waiting done by his and Quentin’s family until this moment, and it all relied on Eliot being able to follow it through now.

“There’s probably a few things you should know,” Eliot told her.

She shook her head.

“I know, Eliot,” she said. “Quentin was in love with you, and no offense, but you never did a very good job of hiding it either. Whatever this is,” she gestured at Jade, “doesn’t matter if it can bring him back and fix all of this mess.”

Eliot felt a little guilty, but he couldn’t argue with any of her logic. If the plan worked, and all of this was averted, there wasn’t much left to discuss. 

“Tell Margo for me?” he asked her.

“I will,” she promised.

So, he reached out to squeeze her shoulder once before turning to go back to Jade.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Eliot told her.

“Great,” Jade smiled.

And there was just something in that smile, the same thing he’d noticed before. It was just so _Quentin_.

He said, “One last thing. You, I mean, our family. Have they been…?”

Jade nodded. “We’ve been here in Fillory all along,” she promised.

On an impulse, Eliot reached out and pulled her into a tight hug. Jade didn’t hesitate to hug him back as she wrapped her arms around him. Eliot buried his face in her shoulder for just a second and allowed himself to really realize that this was his family. His and Quentin’s. Their impact on this timeline was real, and it was once again going to save the entire world. How improbable was it for that to happen once, nevertheless twice? He gave Jade’s shoulders one last squeeze before stepping back.

“Maybe I’ll try to find some of them, when this is all over,” he told her.

She said, “I think that’s a great idea.”

“And Jade, for the record, I’m really glad I got to meet you,” Eliot added. He gave her a sad smile and said, “Quentin would have loved you.”

“I’m glad too,” Jade agreed, beaming up at him.

Eliot gave her a small smile before opening up the pocket watch again and looking down at it. 

“I guess it’s time,” he said.

Jade squeezed his upper arm with an encouraging smile, and Alice gave him a curt nod. He held the watch in front of his face and watched its hands spin. The two of them stepped back.

“Here goes nothing,” he said.

He closed his eyes and pushed the button.

When he opened them again, he was standing on a grassy hillside in front of some ruins that most definitely did not look American. It was warm, and he was in some kind of clearing surrounded by a dense forest. There was the sound of movement behind him, and he whipped around to see... himself? No, it must have been the monster because Eliot didn’t remember this. It was really fucking weird to see himself carrying out the actions of someone else though.

The monster was standing in front of what looked like an altar talking to a man Eliot didn’t recognize at first, but then, all of a sudden, he did. It wasn’t that the man looked like anyone Eliot had ever seen before, but he’d know those mannerisms anywhere. The dipped shoulders, the quick brush of his hair behind his ear, the nervous shuffle in his feet, and the placating hand held out in front of him as he tried to reason with the eldritch terror.

He knew without a doubt that it was Quentin, under the glamour of Brian. 

The monster snapped his fingers, and Quentin fell to the ground screaming. Eliot brought his fist to his mouth and bit down on it as he shuffled behind a tree with his back to the scene unfolding behind him. He closed his eyes and slowly exhaled as he tried to ground himself.

 _Here we motherfucking go_ , he thought.


	2. Chapter 2

Eliot felt like he might throw up or, if he’s lucky, maybe the earth might open up and let him fall right in it.

He was hiding behind a goddamn tree while the monster who had wrecked his body forced Quentin to sacrifice a pig in order to lure some god to meet them. He had to think about this, and fast. 

One thing was becoming rapidly apparent in his mind. He was clearly at a disadvantage if he was meant to be the one to orchestrate a whole timeline change, considering he’d been absent during this entire ordeal. He’d gotten the rundown from Margo about the events of last year to an extent and while he had been actively trying to tune her out, which looking back wasn’t the most helpful thing he could have done. He’d also had a weird conversation with Julia one night where she’d spilled a lot of her side of it, which he remembered a bit more of. He really could have used a powerpoint presentation to draw from right about then though.

Still, he wasn’t totally in the dark. He knew the basics from his own internal research, and he hoped that would be enough. 

The god in question appeared behind the altar, and Eliot’s attention was snapped back to the scene unfolding in the present. Or the past? God, he was going to have to find some painkillers somewhere for his inevitable oncoming headache.

The monster stalked towards the god, giving his spiel, and Eliot did a quick spell to enhance the volume of their conversation. 

“I want it back. Give it to me.”

“Well, I have no idea what ‘it’ is, but I grant you permission to search my ball sack with your tongue,” the god spat.

“Fine,” the monster took a step back, “I’ll just take it.”

Eliot looked away as the monster shoved his hand inside the god’s chest cavity, searching for whatever it is he’d lost. Eliot focused his attention on Quentin instead, who was looking away like he was going to be sick as well. 

“You’re not Enyalius, are you?” the monster asked.

“No, I’m not,” the god told him, and then his face twisted into a pained smirk, “and you’re not as alone here as you think you are.”

The monster gave him an odd look before seemingly dismissing the comment and digging his hand in deeper. Eliot didn’t imagine the way the god’s eyes flicked in his direction though as he did it. Quentin did a quick look around the clearing too, barely skimming over where Eliot was hiding. That… couldn’t be good.

Then Quentin rushed forward, “Alright, look, he’s not who you want.”

It took everything in Eliot not to blow his whole cover and try to stop Q from running recklessly into this. He knew the monster didn’t kill him in the end, but god, he could have and Quentin didn’t even think twice.

“You could, you know, let him go, right?” Quentin tried.

Ignoring him, the monster turned back around to question the god some more, but that’s not what had Eliot’s attention. Eliot was still watching Quentin because something was happening.

His face and body contorted strangely, blurring and twisting until suddenly it stopped, and he fell back against the stone altar. And then he was _Quentin_. No glamour or memory wipe spell, just Quentin. Eliot felt the sight of him like a knife to the chest. 

Unfortunately, the monster noticed too.

“Quentin, you’re back.”

Quentin deliberately strode forward then, using his hands to tut some kind of spell, but the monster stopped him. The god behind him fell to the ground with a sickening thump.

“Oh, you wanted to play,” the monster said curiously. “Sorry, he’s too dead.”

And so the scene unfolded, as it was always destined to. The monster talked Q into sitting up there on the ledge with him, as if he had a choice, while he cuddled right up to him and laid his head onto his shoulder. He was like a little kid wanting comfort after a bruised knee except this little kid could snap Quentin’s neck with his pinky. Eliot felt a fierce need to protect Quentin from him, even though technically this had already happened. 

“Maybe, when you get what the god’s took from you… could I maybe have Eliot back?” Quentin asked.

Eliot closed his eyes as he swallowed around the lump in his throat. _Oh, Q_. This wasn’t supposed to be happening this time. He was supposed to be stopping this. Every second that Quentin was being tortured by this thing in the name of saving Eliot’s life was a second wasted on his one and only chance at fixing this.

But then, they were gone. 

There one minute, disappeared the next. Just like that, Eliot was standing alone on a grassy hillside in Greece.

He stepped out into the open clearing, looking around at the blood and death surrounding him in their wake. Was this what he was sent to the past for, to be stuck on the other side of the world as his friends played out the same tragedy line by line? Was it some kind of cosmic joke? Or was he supposed to have changed something here that he’d already missed?

He pulled the watch out of his pocket and opened it. 

“Why did you send me here?” he shouted into the woods, at nothing and no one.

He looked up and around him, feeling the panic rising in his chest. 

“How the hell am I supposed to stop anything half a world away?!” he yelled again.

He was answered only by the sound of birds scattering from treetops, and his shoulders slumped as he took a step backwards. He looked back down at the watch.

Jade had told him it would take him where he needed to go and only there, right? That didn’t necessarily mean there was only one place he needed to go. It was a watch that traveled him through time as well as space, apparently. So, maybe he’d just push the button again. See what happened.

He clicked the watch and stumbled back a bit as he unsteadily landed with the unsettling feeling of traveling, astonished to find himself standing on a busy New York City street. 

“Huh, so that worked,” he mumbled.

He looked around himself quickly. He recognized this street, which was a good start. Then, in front of him, he watched the monster drag Quentin into a high rise building. That’s right, this was Kady’s apartment building, which meant his friends must all be inside. He hurried over to the corner of the building and watched through the glass door as they stepped inside the elevator. Okay, so this must be the point in which they all figured out he was possessed. 

Including... oh shit.

Margo was rushing inside the building after them, and Eliot once again felt that tug inside him to stop her. To grab her and explain everything and hold her back from rushing right into a death trap.

He couldn’t though, could he? Because that would ruin everything. He couldn’t run in after her and try to stop what was about to happen next without revealing his presence to literally everyone and jeopardizing the entire timeline.

Which made this whole quest _pointless_. He paced down the sidewalk away from the building and groaned. He’d been given literally the most important task in the entire world, and he was _failing_. What good was he to his friends or to Quentin or to the entire goddamn universe if he couldn’t pull this off?

He turned on his heel, ready to see if the other side of the pavement had any answers for him, and stopped immediately at the sight of a person who definitely hadn’t been there two seconds ago.

“Hiya!”

Of all the people in the world who could have been standing in front of him, he had to say he hadn’t expected her.

“ _Jade_?” he asked.

“Uh huh,” she nodded.

“What?” he looked around. “I mean, how?”

He was at a loss for words. Her smile only grew wider though as she bounced on her heels.

“Look, after you left, I started thinking,” she said quickly, “and it didn’t seem fair that you had to come back here all by yourself for something as big as this. You needed a sidekick!”

His mouth fell open and then closed again as he looked at her, still not quite processing that she was real.

“So, I’m here!” she finished, holding her hands out pointedly.

“Yes,” he said, still processing her explanation, “you are, but how are you here, exactly?”

She reached inside her pocket and pulled out a watch that matched his own. She proudly said, “I had the dwarves make me one too.”

He looked at the watch then back at her.

He asked, “I thought those took 300 years to make?”

She grinned at him. “Good thing I had a time traveling stamp, then, isn’t it?”

“Does Margo know you’re here?” he asked skeptically.

She was supposed to be helping Jade and keeping her from doing something stupid like this. That’s why Eliot had sent her to Margo in the first place. 

“It was implied,” she hedged.

Eliot laughed, mostly out of disbelief, as he scrubbed his hand over his mouth. This could not be happening.

“You have to go back home,” he told her. “This is too dangerous. What are you anyway, sixteen? What happens to you if something goes wrong here?”

She placed her hands on her hips. She said, “I’m twenty-one years old, thank you very much, and I can make my decisions for myself.”

“Right. Of course you can,” he said, “but this isn’t just some little game. This is life or death, and if I don’t get it right, there are _terrible_ consequences.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Jade challenged, her eyebrows raised at him. “I grew up in the world built on what happens when things go wrong here, Eliot. Don’t lecture me about terrible consequences. I’ve watched my family and friends suffer for my entire _life_ thanks to a few magicians hundreds of years ago who failed to do the right thing, and do you know what kept me going?” 

He gulped as he looked at her, all fiery indignation as she stared him down. He asked, “What?”

“The promise that someone was going to come along and change all of it,” she said, “and that someone was supposed to be you.”

He looked down at the concrete. Yeah, it was supposed to be him, and what a great job he was doing of it.

“But,” she continued, “why should the weight of the entire world have to rest on your shoulders alone?”

He looked up at her, and her expression was something softer, kinder now.

“I couldn’t just go home and wait for everything to be magically fixed when there was finally something I could do about it,” she told him. She gestured at him. “Besides, it seems like you could use some help.”

She simply stared at him once she’d finished, daring him to disagree. Of course she wasn’t the type to sit out on a quest. She was a Coldwater-Waugh, emphasis on the Coldwater part. Eliot had been naive to expect anything less than this. He sighed. He felt his own capitulation coming on as he stared back at her. 

Little volunteer tomato, ripe and ready for the picking.

“God, you really are related to Quentin, aren’t you?” he asked.

She reached out and nudged his shoulder. “And you,” she said.

He smiled at her, and she grinned back.

“Alright, fine,” he said, and she clapped excitedly. He continued, “I think I might actually know the perfect way for you to help.”

They abandoned the scene of the apartment, temporarily, in favor of a coffee shop around the corner. Eliot bought them both lattes and settled in the seat across from her at a table by the window, watching as she took in the place with a look of awe.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

He laughed as he slid one of the drinks in front of her. He said, “Yeah, if you ask me, the quality of life in Fillory could be drastically improved by a few Starbucks locations.”

She immediately picked up the drink and started to bring it to her lips, and he reached out to stop her.

“Wait,” he said, “it’s hot. You have to give it a minute to cool.”

“Oh,” she said carefully, as she sat the drink back down, eyeing it suspiciously. He laughed under his breath.

“So,” he began, “we need to come up with a plan if this is going to work, because it seems this isn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped.”

“Okay,” she said, folding her arms on the table in front of her, “so how can I help?”

He said, “Well, the first major problem is that these are my friends and they all know me, which means they know I am supposed to be possessed by a monster and not walking around alive and well in this timeline.”

“Which limits the ways you can interfere,” she surmised. She glossed right over the monster part so easily that Eliot had to wonder what she’d seen in her life not to question it.

“Exactly,” he said.

“So you want me to, what? Go become besties with Grandpa Q?” she asked.

Eliot scoffed at her, and her eyes twinkled as she smiled up at him over the coffee she was now happily sipping.

“Not exactly,” he told her, “but I’m thinking it could be useful to have you infiltrate the dream team with some surprisingly convenient information.”

She nodded along seriously. 

“And don’t ever call me grandpa,” he added. “It’s weird.”

“Got it, gramps,” she said without missing a beat, and he rolled his eyes. She continued, “Which brings me to my next question. What exactly do I need to know about what’s going on here? No offense to the you who set up this time loop, but you could have given me a few more details to work with.”

“You weren’t even supposed to be involved in this at all,” he told her pointedly.

“And yet here I am,” she shrugged, “so tell me the plan.”

“Alright,” he conceded, “so, the monster that’s possessing past me is basically unkillable. He’s trying to build a body, which he thinks is his, but actually it’s his sister’s. The thing is, he doesn’t remember any of that. He just knows that the gods took something from him, but he hasn’t figured out what that something is yet.”

She asked, “So, how does he figure it out? That sounds like something we should stop from happening.”

“Julia is the one who told him it was a body because they found it in a page from a book, and she did that to keep him from killing all of them,” he mused, “which, he was going to do because Quentin found out I was still alive and saved me at the last possible second.”

“Okay, well we’ve gotta get that book before they do,” Jade said.

“Or,” he countered, “we figure out a way to let everyone know I’m still alive before they almost kill the monster and, consequently me, in the first place.”

“Smart,” she conceded.

That would stop Margo from running off to Fillory and becoming a werewolf, and it would keep Quentin away from that deal Julia made with Iris. Eliot didn’t know what they were going to do about Josh or the angry little goddess who was blackmailing Julia, but he knew they’d find a way. Quentin would never agree to it if he knew that Eliot was alive, and that meant keeping the monster in the dark about his missing pieces for a little longer as well.

The question was how they were going to let Quentin and the others know.

He tapped his knuckles on the wooden table as he thought it over. It wouldn’t be as easy as trying to get them to take Jade’s word for it. The only way Quentin or Margo would believe it is for Eliot himself to tell them, like he’d done in the park. Which meant they needed to get past him out of his happy place a little bit ahead of schedule. That meant they had to talk to past him and let him in on the whole recon mission, and there was only one way to do that.

“I think we’re going to need a psychic,” he admitted, “and I happen to know one, but he’s not going to be excited about helping us.”

Jade huffed, “Then he can get over it because this is important.”

Eliot grinned at her.

“I’m glad you think so because you’re the one who has to talk to him,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow and grinned back at him. 

“Bring it on,” she replied.

So, it was settled. They would bring 23 into the fold. They’d wipe his memory of the whole thing if they had to, but Eliot knew himself. Getting Jade to talk to Eliot’s formerly possessed self would definitely work to get him on board, even if he thought she was some kind of happy place hallucination. They could cut a lot of problems off at the knees if they just slowed down the panic train that Quentin and Margo were about to hop aboard when the monster told them that he was dead. The next step was obvious though and a bit more complicated.

“So, what about past you then?” Jade asked, on the same wavelength as him. “How did they get the monster out of you last time, and is that still an option?”

He’d been thinking about this one. Avoiding Margo’s banishment was step one of stopping Fillory from descending into a fascist hellscape, which meant that he was going to have to do this without her little desert adventure. It would also be nice not to be axed down if there was a better option, but it was going to be tricky. If there was a clear, better option, Quentin would have found it to begin with. Then there was the obvious problem of having to dispose of the monster once he was out, because Eliot would be damned if a single one of them was going anywhere near the seam. 

The problems involved in fixing this mess just kept appearing like a goddamn hydra, cut off one and two more would grow in its place. 

“I’m still working that out,” he admitted.

Jade looked somewhat worried about that, but she didn’t say anything. She just started picking at the cardboard collar around her cup.

“Okay, so onto Fillory, then,” she said.

“Well,” he hedged, “that one gets complicated too. This guy named Everett was hoarding magic from the wellspring in a sea under the castle, which is what colossally fucked up all of magic and time in the first place. So, we have to do something about that.”

She simply stared at him, and he asked, “What?”

“You were planning to do all this by yourself?” she asked skeptically.

“Well, when you spell it out like that, it sounds ridiculous,” he admitted.

She raised her eyebrows and nodded at him knowingly. He barely resisted the childish urge to stick his tongue out at her.

She fell quiet for a moment, and Eliot allowed himself to get caught up in his own thoughts about just how complicated this whole thing was going to be as he turned to stare out the window. He was acutely aware that he could make one wrong move and leave everything more of a mess than it had been before. As if waking up in a world where Q had died wasn’t the absolute worst case scenario. It was a horrible possibility that there were worse options, but it was impossible to ignore. What if the monsters or Everett had won, after all?

“Poor Quentin,” Jade said, bringing his attention back as his head tilted to look at her again. He gave her a curious look at her sudden subject change. She explained, “I just keep thinking about how he must have felt during all this, watching you walk around trapped by that thing. He must have been so scared.”

Eliot felt a pang of guilt and longing as he gave her a small, jerky nod. 

“Q did a lot to protect me,” he told her quietly. “Too much.”

“He loved you,” she pointed out, as if this should have been obvious to him. “He would have done anything.”

“Yeah,” Eliot agreed solemnly.

Quentin did love him, and it had been his ultimate undoing. That was part of why Eliot had rejected him in the first place, to keep him from being poisoned by the destruction that came to everything Eliot touched. It hadn’t worked in the end though because Eliot hadn’t considered the whole truth. He could break Quentin’s heart, but he couldn’t undo what they had, the love they both felt. He’d only hurt them both infinitely more by pushing it away. 

“Well, that doesn’t matter now, because we’re going to save him and make all of this right,” Jade told him.

Eliot smiled at her sadly. “You’re a lot like him, you know,” he said.

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment,” she replied stubbornly.

He laughed as his smile widened. He said, “You definitely should.”

Eliot probably would have sat and contemplated the futility of changing one problem only for another to take its place for the entire day if left to his own devices, but her spark of determination was exactly what he needed. Quentin had never given up on him, no matter how hopeless things looked, and he couldn’t give up now. 

“Alright, then let’s do this. Team Save Quentin and Also the Entire World,” she said proudly. “What’s our first step?”

“We’ve gotta work on a better name. That’s way too wordy,” he told her, and she gave him an unamused look. He continued, “The first step is to get Penny alone and convince him you’re not a crazy person who wants him to project into the mind of a literal monster.”

He looked her over carefully, trying to figure out exactly what her role in all of this was going to be to get them to trust her. They couldn’t exactly give away the whole Coldwater-Waugh farm if this was to remain a stealth mission. No, they had to be more subtle than that. Then it hit him.

“How do you feel about tattoos?” he asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be posting another bonus scene with Jade and Margo after this explaining Jade's appearance!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just gonna gently set this down and run away like it hasn't been almost 3 months since I've updated.

Jade, as it turns out, was a fucking trooper about tattoos. 

Eliot’s next step in his half baked plan was to take her to a very oblivious muggle tattoo parlor and pay for the little black star on the inside of her forearm. He had the passing thought that it was maybe not very responsible of him to be supervising this outing, but that was followed by the slightly more hysterical thought that he was thinking like a parent in a world where he definitely was not on solid enough ground to even consider those implications. So, he pushed all of that aside and watched as she didn’t even flinch under the needle that was unknowingly branding her as a hedge witch.

He wasn’t entirely sure it was a good idea, but it seemed to be the best one he could come up with. The tattoo would serve as proof that she was at least somewhat competent enough to be trusted. It was pretty likely that she had some latent magical ability as his and Quentin’s descendant, but without any actual training, she needed some kind of credibility.

“Okay, let’s go over the plan one more time,” he told the newly minted hedge witch, who was looking up at him very much like an unamused teenager. He’d seen that little eye roll before in a lifetime long ago on his own child’s face, and it was eerie to say the least.

She sighed impatiently before reciting, “We catch Penny alone and then I show him my wrist, tell him to meet me at the park tonight because I can help them with their monster problem, and I get out before anyone else sees me.”

Eliot reached out to pat her cheek, which she batted away as he grinned, and said, “Good girl. Now let’s go stake out the apartment.”

As he was dragging her along with him down the street, she asked, “What’s a stake out?”

“A lot more boring than it sounds,” he told her.

It was mid-afternoon when they finally caught sight of Penny and Kady exiting the apartment from a nearby park bench. 

“That’s him,” he said as he sat up and pointed at Penny, “but let’s wait and see if we can get him alone.” 

He and Jade moved quickly but as stealthily as they could manage as they trailed the two of them to a bank a few blocks away. Penny and Kady sat down at a table at an outdoor cafe and began to watch the entrance of the building, seemingly doing some kind of stake out of their own.

“What are they doing?” Jade asked him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but it looks like they’re waiting on something.”

Then a woman walked out of the bank, flashing a solid black card as she slipped it into her purse, and Penny jumped up to follow her with Kady sneaking off in the opposite direction. It was unmistakably their chance.

“Go time,” he said, nudging Jade’s arm. 

He lurked a few feet behind her with his head down as they followed Penny onto a crowded sidewalk. Then Penny bumped into the woman he was following and stopped. Eliot darted behind a tree as Jade turned to look at a street vendor’s booth nearby. Penny very cleverly distracted the woman with small talk as Kady snuck up behind her and swiped the black card from her purse. Kady pocketed the card and kept walking, and Eliot waited until she was just out of sight before reaching out and nudging Jade in Penny’s direction.

Jade tripped and bumped into Penny with a yelp, causing the woman to give them both a strange look before walking off warily. Jade glared over her shoulder at Eliot, and he quickly gestured for her to turn around because Penny was giving her a dumbfounded look.

“What the hell?” he asked her.

She cleared her throat and stood up straighter, clearly affecting the role Eliot had given her to play.

“I, uh, know something that could help you get rid of your monster,” she said coolly. 

Penny looked her up and down with a disbelieving expression.

“You know something that could help me?” he asked skeptically. “What are you, twelve?”

She glared at him, and Eliot laughed under his breath. Jade lifted her wrist with the tattoo on it and brushed her hair behind her ear, which had the desired effect because Penny’s eyes went directly to her tattoo and flashed knowingly.

“Oh, so you’re a hedge,” he surmised, a wry smile twisting on his face, “and that definitely makes me feel better about trusting you.” He folded his arms over his chest and took a step backwards. “Did Marina send you to spy on me? Because you can tell her that she’ll get her dewey’s.”

“No,” Jade said confidently, “but you should trust me because I know something that Eliot needs to know, and I need you to help me talk to him.”

Penny’s eyes narrowed.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked. “And how do you know about Eliot?”

“Meet me tonight, and I’ll explain everything,” she promised him. She slipped him the piece of paper with the address on it that Eliot had written down, and he looked over it carefully, no doubt checking to see if it was cursed.

“Oh,” she added hurriedly, “and you can’t tell anyone else about this, so come alone. Please.”

Penny pocketed the slip of paper and said, “Right. Look kid, I’ve got kind of an urgent situation happening right now, but thanks for the intel.”

With that, he was suddenly gone. Jade jumped backwards and looked around as Eliot stepped out from behind his hiding spot to join her.

“Did he just disappear?!” she asked incredulously.

“Yeah, he does that,” Eliot said as he placed a hand on her shoulder. “You did great though.”

She looked up at him. “Do you think he’ll come?”

“I hope so,” he replied.

Eliot’s hope led them to an empty park later that night after the sun had set. They’d spent the rest of the afternoon finding an adequate hotel to stay in and introducing Jade to the city, which admittedly had been more fun for Eliot than he’d thought it might be. It was irrevocably weird to be in this timeline, in the past, and to know what was happening to himself and his friends mere blocks away. _Quentin_ was very alive at this moment and within his reach, and it was taking every single bit of his resolve not to run right to him and never let him go. To protect him from all of this. 

He knew better. It would fuck everything up, and they couldn’t afford that. The price was too high. That knowledge didn’t stop the dull ache just behind his ribs though.

After the brief little afternoon respite, they were once again hiding out and waiting for Penny to show. Jade was sitting on a weathered concrete bench at the table in a small circular clearing where they’d planned to meet him, and Eliot was lurking in the shadows of the dense smattering of trees behind her. If all went according to plan, she was going to tell Penny that she needed him to travel her inside the monster’s mind and talk to Eliot to help him break free and that the monster should be interested if he offers. Eliot knew they’d done it once, in the original timeline, because that’s when Penny had found his door. It was likely dangerous but ultimately worth it.

If he’d calculated it correctly, they were at the point in the timeline just before the Monster told Q that he was dead and before Charlton had appeared in his happy place. They had the perfect window, and they just needed to intercede before anything else happened because if they didn’t, then certain things would be set in motion that he wasn’t sure they’d be able to undo.

All of the moving pieces were so fragile that it honestly terrified him. Quentin or Julia would have been better suited for something like this. Or even Alice. Eliot didn’t have the kind of track record that qualified him for a timeline altering, world saving quest. All he had was a desperate hope and a crazy plan, and for once, that had to be enough.

Penny did appear, somewhat surprisingly. Eliot never really knew whether to trust 23 or not, but curiosity had apparently won out over skepticism like he’d hoped it would. He strolled up to Jade and stopped a few feet away from where she sat.

“I’m here, so spill,” he told her.

She opened her mouth to begin to explain their crafted story, and Eliot watched carefully as Penny took it all in. He couldn’t tell for sure if Penny was buying it, but he was listening at least. Eliot was paying so much attention to their conversation that he missed the snap of a twig behind him at first. He didn’t miss what followed though.

A sharp jolt of electricity shot through him, and he cried out before involuntarily stumbling into the clearing and catching the immediate attention of both Penny and Jade.

“Motherfuck!” he yelped and rubbed at his arm as he frantically twisted around to look for the source of the pain.

When he did, he locked eyes with a very shocked looking Julia who was holding a taser in one hand and standing just inside the edge of the dark tree line. He gaped at her in surprise even as the icy implications of being discovered began to set in.

“Eliot, is that you?” she asked incredulously.

He practically yelled in return, “Did you just tase me?!”

“What the fuck,” Penny muttered from behind him.

Everyone looked at each other for one awestruck moment before Julia took a step forward out of the trees and circled him as she walked over to Penny, not taking her eyes off of Eliot the entire time.

“You’re not Eliot,” she decided, “or at least not our Eliot, because I saw the monster earlier, and you’re not….are you?”

He shook his head.

“I’m not possessed,” he answered her half asked question. He sighed, resigning himself to the situation. “I am your Eliot though. Well, sort of.”

There was an awkward pause before Jade piped up, “We’re from your future.”

Julia’s gaze jumped over to her like she was just noticing her presence for the first time, and Eliot rolled his eyes half heartedly. _So much for a covert operation_ , he thought. Then she looked back at Eliot who shrugged at her to indicate that Jade was right.

“Holy shit,” Julia said. “It’s pretty much always a bad sign when someone shows up from your future.”

“Yeah, you could say that,” he half laughed. It was so much like something Q would say that it made his chest ache.

Penny was still looking at him skeptically, but Julia’s guard had dropped considerably. She pocketed the taser she was still holding, and Eliot watched her with raised eyebrows.

“Sorry about that,” she said a little sheepishly. “I couldn’t tell who you were from behind, and I can’t do magic, but this felt like a setup, so.”

He started to tell her it was fine and that he was beginning to regain feeling in his left arm when her eyes lit up.

“Oh my God, we have to go get Q,” she said. She reached out to grab Penny’s arm.

“No!” Eliot shouted. He held out his hand to stop her, dropping it when she looked back at him. He swallowed around the lump that had suddenly formed in his throat. “Quentin can’t know I’m here. It’s kind of important that this stays as much of a secret as possible.”

“Oh,” Julia shifted her weight and considered him, “it’s really bad then.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. He tightened his fists at his sides and released them as he exhaled shakily. “Julia, Q dies if you keep doing what you’re doing right now.” He watched her mouth fall slightly open and eyes widen as he continued, “That’s why I’m here. To stop that from happening.”

There were other reasons, but that was undeniably the main one and the one that he knew would matter the most to her. She looked at him for a moment longer, then at Jade, and then finally said, “Okay. Tell me everything.”

And so he did, from start to finish, or at least what he knew of it. By the time he was done, both Julia and Penny were looking a little shellshocked. He couldn’t blame them. It was a fucking lot to process. He could tell that they believed him though by their sober expressions.

“So, what’s your plan?” Julia asked, jumping right to the chase.

“We need to stop Everett before he can get to the Seam,” Eliot told them, “and you guys have to stop helping the monster hunt down his sister because if he gets those pieces, there’s probably no stopping what comes next.”

“And you want me to take Sabrina the Teenage Hedge Witch inside your mind with me to bust you out?” Penny asked incredulously, gesturing at Jade.

She frowned at him, and Eliot held out a hand to stop her before she opened her mouth to argue. 

“She’s not actually a hedge witch,” he admitted, “that was just a way to get you to listen to her.”

“Who is she then?” Julia asked.

She was looking at Jade very carefully like she was seeing something but couldn’t quite place it. Eliot could take a wild guess at what it was.

“ _She’s_ right here,” Jade pointed out, only slightly sarcastically.

Painfully aware of how vague he sounded but leaving no room for argument, Eliot said, “Jade is someone past me will listen to if she tells me what to do.”

With everything else they’d already spilled, the existence of his and Quentin’s long lost Fillorian grandchild wasn’t really very compromising information, but it was something that he had no intention of explaining at the moment. Thankfully, Julia seemed to accept it for now, although she still looked curious. They weren’t really in a position to not believe him, after all. She turned to Penny.

“Can you do it? Travel yourself and Jade inside the monster’s mind?” she asked.

“I think so,” he nodded, “but I’m not sure he’ll let us. The dude’s not exactly what you would call cooperative.”

“He’ll let you,” Eliot promised. “He’s confused and looking for answers about what he’s missing. You just need to make sure he doesn’t find out anything important while you’re in there.”

“Okay,” Penny agreed, though he still sounded hesitant. “How soon do we need to do this?”

“Tonight?” Eliot tried. 

Penny and Julia exchanged worried glances.

“I don’t think that’s a really good idea,” Julia told him. “Q just found out his dad died about an hour ago, and the monster’s MIA with Margo and Josh.”

“Oh,” Eliot said. He felt like the wind was knocked out of him just a little bit. 

He knew about Ted, of course, but he hadn’t realized the immediacy with which the news had gotten to Quentin in regards to everything else going on. That means he’d found out about his father and was told that Eliot had died within the same 24 hours if his guess on the timeline was right. Eliot felt like he might be sick at the very thought of how much pain Quentin must have been in. Was in, currently. 

“He’s going to his dad’s house tomorrow in Jersey to clean out his stuff,” Julia offered. “Maybe we could keep the monster distracted while he does that and do what we need to do?”

“He’s going to his dad’s alone?” Eliot asked, feeling more of the same dread set in.

Julia bit her lip and looked away as she nodded.

“His mom is meeting him there, but I don’t think she’ll stick around,” she said. “She’s kind of a bitch.”

Eliot thought he remembered Quentin telling him as much once upon a time, in a hazy memory that never was. The details started to come back to him at the gentle prompting. He remembered that they’d had a strained relationship since the divorce, and she’d never really understood him or how his brain worked. Eliot remembered Q telling him how alone she’d made him feel as a teenager when he’d been at his worst. If she was the only person helping him with this... 

“Yeah,” Eliot cleared his throat. “That could work, but I can’t be there. I can’t imagine the monster would handle seeing a second me very well.”

Julia nodded in agreement, and then her eyes lit up. She dug around in her pocket until she pulled out a tacky looking necklace in the shape of half of a heart. It looked like the cheap little best friends necklaces he hadn’t seen since the nineties. He eyed it warily as she held it out to him.

She rolled her eyes at his skeptical expression.

“It’s enchanted with a two way mirror spell,” she explained. “Kady has the other half. I’ll get it from her tonight, and Jade can wear it tomorrow so you’ll be able to see what’s going on.”

He gingerly reached out and took the chain from her hand and examined the “BE BIT” engraved on the front.

“It says ‘best bitches’,” Julia said, a private little smile tugging at her lips at what was no doubt an inside joke. 

“Ah,” he nodded. 

He tucked it inside his suit jacket pocket. He’d worn tackier jewelry for worse reasons in his life, he supposed. 

“Thank you,” Julia said earnestly, and he looked back up at her to see a surprisingly emotional expression on her face. “For coming back here to fix it,” she clarified, “I don’t know what I would do if…”

The horrifying reality that she was grappling to simply imagine rose to the surface of Eliot’s mind again. It wasn’t just an ‘if.’ It had happened, and it was terrible. Too terrible for words. Eliot cleared his throat.

“Doing nothing wasn’t an option,” he said simply. 

She nodded at him like she understood, and he felt like something shifted between them then. He hadn’t wanted this many people to know what he was up to, but having Julia as an ally seemed like maybe it was worth the potential complications. No one would fight as hard for this to work as she would, come hell or high water.

As they started to go their own ways for the night, Eliot couldn’t stop thinking about what Julia and Penny were about to go home to. The reality of Quentin sitting at the penthouse right now, alone and hurting during all of this, felt so much more horrific with his knowledge of the outcome. He found himself unable to leave suddenly without saying _something_.

“Julia,” he called.

She stopped and turned to look at him.

“Just… take care of Q for me,” he said. “Please.” 

Julia’s expression turned a little soft as she gave him a small dimpled smile and nodded. 

She said, “I will.”

The reassurance gave him a little bit of comfort. He’d seen how pale her face had gotten when he’d told her exactly what was coming for them. He didn’t have to tell her specifically what Quentin had done in the mirror realm for her to know. If she knew that much, then this timeline was already headed in a better direction. It had to be.

Penny and Julia got their hands on a cell phone and a credit card for him, which Penny unceremoniously delivered later that night, and he and Jade settled in at their room to wait for Julia’s call the following day. Jade was busy flipping through the channels on the hotel TV, fully enamoured with the principle of the thing, while Eliot sat on his single bed and took advantage of his newfound resources to do a little previously unplanned research.

“What are you going to do tomorrow while I’m with Penny and Julia?” Jade asked him. “Just hang out here and watch?”

“Yeah,” he answered, not looking up from his phone. “Where else would I go?”

He finished typing his credit card number into the specified blank and reviewed the itinerary on the screen in front of him. He probably should have felt bad about lying to her so blatantly, but he couldn’t find it within himself to feel guilty given everything.

One roundtrip train ticket reservation to New Jersey in the morning was staring up at him. One press of a button to do something that was arguably very stupid with a million possible consequences. 

He thought about Quentin again, alone and in pain as he retreated further into himself to escape it all. The image that conjured made his heart sink into his stomach.

Before he could second guess himself again, he pressed the button and booked the ticket.


	4. Chapter 4

Both Jade and Eliot were practically buzzing with nerves the next morning by the time Penny appeared unceremoniously in the middle of their hotel room.

“Jesus Christ!” Eliot shouted, dropping his phone onto the floor.

Eliot’s outburst seemed to startle Jade more than Penny had, which resulted in her choking on her cheap hotel coffee. She’d already had three cups, and Eliot was starting to worry he’d created a caffeine addict.

Penny offered them both a quietly amused smile.

“Sorry,” he said.

Eliot reached down for his phone and stood as he replied, "It’s okay. It’s not like I needed a functioning heart for anything.”

Penny still looked a little bit like he was enjoying himself even as he got down to business and asked, “Are you guys ready? Quentin just left, and the monster’s getting bored and threatening to follow him.”

Eliot’s heart, which was already beating fast, skipped a beat at that. He was absolutely not going to let that happen.

“We’re ready,” he told Penny, all traces of humor gone. 

Penny nodded, and Eliot turned to look at Jade. 

“Remember what we talked about?” he asked her.

She nodded her head. 

“Past me is probably going to be stubborn about it,” he warned her.

The look she gave him let him know exactly what she was going to say before she said it.

“Where do you think I got it from?” she asked.

He rolled his eyes as she gave him a knowing laugh. When he turned back to Penny, he was giving them both a very strange look, which Eliot chose to pretend he hadn’t noticed.

With an increasingly brief window of opportunity, there wasn’t much time for conversation after that. Penny and Jade were off, and Eliot settled in to wait. 

Jade was nervous. She’d been mostly excited that Eliot had trusted her to help in such a big way, but now that she’d closed her eyes and opened them again in a new room with strange people, including a monster who could kill her instantly, she was starting to feel the reality of the situation set in.

The first thing she noticed was the monster, and she couldn't make herself look away. He looked like Eliot, of course, but he was so unlike Eliot that it was unnerving. 

His eyes held a bored expression, his hair fell around his face in messy waves, and he was hunched over on the sofa eating something with a posture she’d never once seen Eliot adopt. The sight sent a chill right through her.

Then Julia appeared in front of her, placing a hand on her arm to get her attention, and she jumped before settling in relief at the distraction.

“Are you sure about doing this?” Julia asked quietly. “I know Eliot said it’s the only way, but Penny might be able to do this one on his own.”

Her eyes were kind as she regarded Jade not unlike one would approach a terrified animal in the woods. Jade squared her shoulders. She had one job here, and she wasn’t going to let Eliot down.

“I’m sure,” she nodded.

Julia gave her a still worried looking smile and squeezed her arm, and Jade did her best to look reassuring. 

The monster noticed them then, and Julia dropped her hand as he rose stiffly from the sofa and looked at them.

“Who is this?” he asked, his voice monotone and lifeless, a parody of Eliot’s.

Jade tried to keep her every muscle from tensing as Julia subtly stepped in front of her.

“This is Jade,” she explained, “the girl we told you about who can help with your memories.”

The monster stared at her curiously.

“Jade,” he said, drawing out the syllable like he was testing the way it sounded in his mouth.

Julia prompted, “Penny is going to take her inside your mind so that she can figure out what you’re missing.”

The monster circled the sofa then, and Jade fought every instinct within her to stay rooted to the spot. She practically heard Julia holding her breath as he approached. He stopped in front of the two of them and simply stared at Jade. She didn’t blink as he examined her face.

“I hope you’ll be helpful to me, Jade,” he finally said, and she couldn’t stop herself from gulping. 

“I will,” she replied, her voice shaking just a little bit as it came out.

He looked at her for a moment longer before a small smile crept onto his face. It was all wrong, how it reached his eyes in a manic sort of way.

“Good,” he said. “Let’s begin.”

He turned his back, and she exhaled as the tension she’d been holding left her body in a rush. She looked to Julia again and saw her doing the exact same thing. She didn’t know whether she was relieved or not that it wasn’t just her who was utterly terrified of this thing.

Before the monster could turn back to them, Julia quickly pulled a necklace out of her pocket, the other half to the one she’d given Eliot the night before, and slipped it into Jade’s hand. Jade nodded and reached up to slide it over her head. The monster was busy arranging a circle of chairs for them, so she peeked at the necklace out of curiosity. 

She’d expected to see the inside of the hotel room from earlier, where Eliot was supposed to be waiting, but her eyes narrowed as she took in an entirely different scene. Eliot was wearing the necklace, but he was in some kind of moving carriage filled with other people. She barely saw a flash of Eliot’s hand reaching out for something when the monster cleared his throat, and she dropped the necklace quickly. 

“Percy! Jade!” he called.

He sat down in one chair and watched with a childlike anticipation as Penny and Jade walked over to sit in the remaining two. Penny met her eyes with a knowing expression and an almost imperceptible nod before reaching out his hand. She took it and closed her eyes when she saw him close his. 

It was only a few seconds before she opened them again to a dizzying new location. They were standing in a field of sorts in the middle of a forest.

“Where are we?” the monster asked.

Penny answered, “We’re inside your mind. This is some kind of memory. Do you recognize it?”

The monster looked around silently for a moment before replying, “No.” He turned to look at Jade sharply. “You said you were going to help me, but there’s nothing here.”

Before she could think of anything to say, Penny took on an uncharacteristically softer tone as he said, “Hey, that’s okay. Let’s look around a little more and see what we can find.”

The monster seemed interested enough to be appeased by that, so he took a step forward into the clearing, with Penny staying close to him. Jade took the opportunity to look over her shoulder and do a survey of the area. Eliot had told her to look for a door. He’d said it was the sort of thing she couldn’t miss, and she desperately hoped he was right because she wasn’t sure how long they were going to be able to keep the monster here. 

Penny was walking the monster away from her one calculated step at a time as she continued to scan the treeline. Finally, as if out of thin air, her eyes caught on the door as it appeared. It was an old wooden door, the kind she’d seen in the old villages in Fillory. She took one last look over her shoulder to confirm that the monster was sufficiently distracted before making a run for it.

The door was locked when she tried to push it open, and she glanced over her shoulder again before knocking. No one answered, but she thought she could hear sounds of life coming from behind it. She knocked again, her pounding growing more frantic this time, and kept knocking until it suddenly swung open.

She practically fell forward onto the person who’d opened it. Then, shockingly, she realized she knew the person standing in front of her.

“Margo?” she asked.

Margo looked her up and down, not unlike the way the actual Margo had done upon meeting her, and asked, “What’s it to you?”

Eliot, the real Eliot, appeared behind her then in the doorway.

“Bambi, let the poor girl in,” he chided fondly. “She looks terrified.”

Margo eyed her suspiciously one more time even as she stepped aside for her to enter. The door was closed behind her, and she turned around to face Eliot, remembering her mission.

“Eliot, we need to talk,” she said resolutely.

Eliot looked only passively interested as he replied, “Okay, but we need drinks first.”

He turned away from them, presumably to get the drinks, and Jade was about to burst with her impatience to just get this over with. She said, “No! We don’t have much time.”

Eliot stopped and turned around, looking slightly more intrigued. He asked, “Much time for what?”

“None of this is real,” she rushed out, and Eliot raised an eyebrow at her. She continued, “A monster is possessing your body, and we’re inside your mind right now.”

Eliot’s mouth dropped open as he asked, “Wh-what?”

“The monster has you locked in here to distract you, and all of this is fake,” she explained. “Don’t believe me? You can control it. Just imagine Margo isn’t here.”

Eliot closed his eyes, despite Margo’s silent protests, and when he opened them again, they were alone in the room.

“Holy shit,” he said as he stared at the empty space she’d once occupied. 

Then he looked back at Jade.

He asked, “Who are you?”

She dodged the question as well as she could, realizing she likely didn’t have time to convince him of her lineage.

“Your friends sent me to tell you that you have to get out of here,” she told him. “The monster is about to tell the real Margo and Quentin that you’re dead, and they need to know that you’re still alive in here before they kill your body.”

“Okay,” he said, still somewhat skeptically, “let’s say you’re telling the truth. How am I supposed to get my body back?”

“There’s a door,” she said. “It’s hidden in a forgotten memory.”

“Oh, well that’s useful,” Eliot quipped with a roll of his eyes.

Suddenly, the sound of the monster’s voice cut through their silence. Through the door, she could hear a muffled, “Jade! You aren’t being very helpful!”

Eliot’s gaze followed the sound of the voice too, his eyes wide, before looking back at her.

He asked, “Is that…?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling that icy chill gathering in her chest again. She really needed to go, right now. 

“The memory with the door will be your biggest regret,” she told him seriously. Then she braced herself to deliver the line Eliot had promised her would work. “You have a proof of concept for it.”

Eliot went pale, and she could immediately tell that whatever memory the words had conjured up for him had been effective. The monster yelled again, his sing-song voice growing more impatient.

So quietly she almost didn’t hear it, Eliot asked her again, “Who are you?”

She could see in his eyes that he already had some kind of idea, even if it seemed implausible in his mind. She smiled.

“I really hope you get to find out one day,” she said.

Then she heard Penny’s voice calling her name from outside.

“I have to go,” she said. Then she hesitated before giving him a somewhat awkward and quick hug, which he half responded to before she was backing away again. As she hurried towards the door, she called, “Good luck!”

She barely made it outside before Penny grabbed her arm and everything went black. When she opened her eyes again, they were standing in the hotel room instead of sitting in the chairs they’d left previously.

“You good?” Penny asked her.

She nodded as she caught her breath and asked, “Where’s the monster?”

“Hopefully still asleep at the penthouse,” he replied, “but I gotta go get Julia before he wakes up.”

“Yeah, of course,” she nodded. 

Before Penny disappeared again, he asked, “Do you think it worked?”

She thought back to Eliot’s expression before she’d left.

“I hope so,” she said.

Then Penny disappeared, and she sat down on the edge of her bed to wait. Only then did she realize that Eliot wasn’t in the room.

The train lurched to a stop, and Eliot dropped the necklace he’d been gripping for the entire journey and leaned his head back onto the seat cushion. They’d done it. He almost couldn’t believe it.

He knew though, from the expression on his past self’s face when Jade delivered the ‘proof of concept’ blow, that it would work exactly the way he’d planned for it to. He’d trusted her, and he’d known exactly what she meant. Now it was just a waiting game for Quentin and Margo to get back and see it for themselves.

Which, speaking of.

Eliot rose from his seat to follow the other passengers off the train and onto the platform, trying to suppress the emotion bubbling up into his chest the whole time. He’d never been to Quentin’s father’s house, but it hadn’t taken long to figure out the address. 

Quentin had told him so much about his childhood home that he almost felt like he recognized it when the uber pulled up and dropped him off at the curb outside.

He steeled himself at the front door, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, before he brought his fist up to knock.

He waited a moment, but there was no answering flurry of movement indicating that anyone was coming. He peeked through the window but wasn’t able to make out much of anything through the curtains. There was no car in the driveway, which he assumed meant that Quentin’s mom had already left just like Julia said she would. 

He decided to try the knob instead and felt relieved as it turned and clicked open. He slipped inside.

The house was quiet, empty. It was the kind of stillness you’d expect to find in a place where no one had lived in quite some time. Boxes littered every surface in the living room and kitchen as he passed through, and he supposed someone had already been by to do most of the heavy lifting because there was no way Quentin had time to do all of that today. 

His head shot up when he heard a clattering noise from a room down the hall, followed by a sigh and a shuffling of feet.

His heart picked up in his chest. He’d known what he’d find when he came here, of course. It was why he’d booked the ticket, despite his better judgment. That didn’t mean he’d been ready to face it. To face him.

He heard the sound of a cardboard box being tossed onto the floor, and he willed himself to keep walking. He’d already come too far to back out now. Besides, he didn’t think he could leave now even if he wanted to, and he should probably want to.

What he was doing was risky beyond measure. Still, he carried on.

He made it to an open doorway, where he paused to take in the scene before him. There were boxes stacked along one side of the room, and the remaining portion of the room was filled with little model airplanes. It was admittedly an impressive collection. And there, in the center of all the mess, was Quentin sitting on the floor holding one of the planes in his hands. He was inspecting it like it held some kind of great secret if he could only figure it out. Then he sighed and turned to place it in the box to his right. Eliot watched for just a moment longer before he couldn’t take it anymore.

He knocked on the doorframe and winced slightly as Quentin jumped.

When Quentin turned around, his posture immediately tensed. He just looked so, so tired, and it made something inside Eliot’s chest crack right open.

“Hey, Q,” he said.

His voice wobbled a bit, and he cleared his throat to try to get a hold on it.

Quentin squinted up at him before turning his back to him again.

“Look, whatever you want, I promise we’ll do it,” he sighed, “but I have to finish this first.”

Eliot realized then what was happening. Quentin thought he was the monster because of course he did. Eliot braced himself as he entered the room. Quentin didn’t turn around again as he approached, so he was careful as he sat down on the floor next to him.

Quentin continued to studiously avoid looking in his direction, and Eliot could hardly stand it.

“Q,” he tried again. Quentin froze for a split second before continuing his methodical packing. “Q, it’s me. Eliot. Not the monster.”

Quentin stopped then and stared straight ahead at the wall in front of him.

“You’re not Eliot,” he said to the wall with a practiced patience, “and I’m sorry, but I’m really not in the mood for games right now, so if you could just…”

Eliot lifted his hand to reach out but froze when Quentin flinched away. He dropped it.

“Fifty years,” he said. It was quiet, but just loud enough for Quentin to understand. He asked, “Who gets that kind of proof of concept?”

Quentin turned to look at him finally, and he held his breath.

“Eliot?” he asked, his voice disbelieving but containing the undeniable beginnings of hope.

Eliot nodded as a smile spread across his face.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he said.

Quentin stared at him for a few seconds longer before launching right into his arms. Eliot didn’t waste a single second catching him and pulling him close. He felt like a thousand pound weight had been lifted off of his chest as he dropped his head to rest it on top of Quentin’s.

“You have no idea how good it is to see you,” he mumbled into his hair.

Quentin’s fists tightened in the back of his jacket, and he let out a shuddering breath against Eliot’s neck. Eliot wanted to stay right there in that moment indefinitely. It wasn’t the reunion he desperately wanted, but it was more than he’d ever expected to get. 

Way too soon though, Quentin pulled back to look at him.

“Eliot, oh my god,” he said. The situation seemed to be catching up to him quickly. “Is the monster gone? Are you okay?”

His hands patted down Eliot’s shoulders and arms somewhat frantically, like he needed to make sure he was real and not a figment of his imagination.

“It’s… very complicated,” Eliot answered carefully.

Quentin’s eyebrows furrowed. He asked, “What does that mean?”

Eliot replied, “The monster isn’t gone, not yet anyways. I’m not...that Eliot.”

Quentin’s hands stayed gripped on his forearms, but he paused, suspicion creeping back into his features. Eliot hurried to explain.

“I’m from the future of this timeline,” he said. “Some things got really fucked up, and I somehow got nominated to fix them.”

Quentin eyed him for a moment longer, and Eliot could tell his mind was moving a million miles an hour.

He said, “If you’re from the future, then that means we win. We get the monster out.”

Eliot felt his throat catch on the emotional reaction that he wasn’t about to let himself express. Of course that was what Quentin had taken away.

“You get the monster out,” he confirmed, “but Q...things go really, really wrong.”

A little timidly, Quentin asked, “How wrong?”

Eliot could see it in his eyes. The spark had been lit, and it was terrifying. He was about to weigh whatever the consequences were against losing Eliot to the monster, and Eliot was honestly scared to death of the conclusion he knew Quentin would reach. Eliot couldn’t tell him what happened. He couldn’t let Quentin entertain it for even a second.

“Bad enough for me to travel back in time to fix it,” he said instead. “Don’t worry about it though. Everything’s going to work out this time, and it’s going to be better.”

He could see that Quentin wanted to press him for more details. 

He asked, “You’re going to wipe my memory of this, aren’t you?”

Eliot nodded.

“You know I have to,” he said.

“Then tell me how we get you out,” Quentin demanded.

Eliot couldn’t help the laugh that escaped him. God, he loved this stubborn man.

He asked, “What would be the point of that if you’re going to forget it?”

“What could it hurt if I’m going to forget it?” Quentin countered.

Eliot sighed as he stared at Quentin’s determined expression.

“It doesn’t matter,” Eliot told him. “The cost is way too high, and I’m not letting you guys do it this time.”

Eliot thought about Margo’s banishment and Fillory’s descent into chaos. Fen and Josh’s deaths. Quentin taking the bottles to the Seam. No, they weren’t going to repeat any of that.

Quentin wanted to argue. Eliot could see it in his eyes. Instead of pushing though, he simply lowered his gaze as his shoulders dropped in defeat.

“If you’re not going to help, then why are you here?” he asked a little dejectedly.

Eliot reached out then, confident that Quentin would let him this time, and placed his hand gently on his knee.

He gestured around the room with his other hand as he said, “Because you shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

Quentin looked up at him again, his eyes noticeably wetter than before, and he simply nodded in reply.

They worked together then, mostly in silence and sometimes making jokes about neutral topics, as they packed up the rest of the planes. It was nice if also a little uneasy. There was the obvious elephant in the room, of course, but they’d entered into some kind of mutual unspoken agreement to let it go for the time being. It was hard to tell what Quentin was really thinking, but Eliot felt only grateful for being allowed this moment. 

He hadn’t been there for Quentin after the mosaic and everything that followed, and he’d never gotten the chance to be there for Quentin through the horrors the monster brought down on him after that. He could hopefully make this one load a little lighter though in some way.

By the time they’d finished packing up the room, he knew he’d been gone for longer than he should have been. Jade would be worried, and Penny and Julia were probably turning the city upside down trying to figure out what had happened to him if the monster hadn’t already retaliated for their diversion.

Quentin could clearly tell their time was coming to an end too.

He stood with his hands on his hips as he looked around the room with an air of finality.

“I guess that’s all of it,” he said.

“Guess so,” Eliot replied.

Quentin turned and took half a step towards him then stopped.

“Thank you,” he said softly.

Eliot smiled at him sadly. He reached out to brush Quentin’s hair out of his eyes. It was shorter than he was used to, but the pieces in the front were growing out enough to fall over his face.

“Thank _you_ ,” he replied, “for letting me help.”

In a hushed voice, Quentin said, “I wish you’d tell me how to save you.”

Eliot wanted to give him whatever he asked for, always, but at that moment, he would have given anything to be able to offer him some kind of road map for the whole clusterfuck of a situation. It was more than any one person should have to bear the responsibility for, especially someone as good as Quentin. Even if Eliot could tell him anything he’d remember, he wouldn’t know what to say though. Quentin and the others were going to have to figure this out on their own, but he was already in the best hands possible with Julia being in the know. It was the most Eliot could offer to try and trust in that.

“You’re going to figure it out,” Eliot promised him.

Quentin sighed as he stared up at him, resigned to taking Eliot’s word for it.

Eliot could hardly make himself turn away to find a piece of paper for the memory wipe spell. He knew he had to do it, and so did Quentin. There was too much at risk with this kind of timeline interference, and he’d already put the whole thing in enough jeopardy with Julia and Penny.

They were both quiet as Quentin watched him sit down to prepare the spell. It was only when Eliot did the final tuts on it to set the circumstances that Quentin spoke up.

“Wait.”

Eliot paused and turned to look up at him.

“Earlier when you were telling me it was you,” Quentin said. Eliot knew instantly where he was going. He continued, “You said fifty years and proof of concept. I, maybe this is stupid because we talked about it already, but did you..? I mean, were you saying?”

Eliot fidgeted with the piece of paper in his hands as he watched Quentin struggle to articulate the question. He was so brave, braver than Eliot has ever been in his entire life. 

Eliot rose to stand in front of him and look down into his sad yet hopeful eyes.

“Yes,” he said. He wasn’t quite sure what he was saying yes to exactly, but the answer was yes. To everything Quentin wanted and more. He leaned down, slowly, as he brought his hand up to cup the back of Quentin’s neck. Quentin inhaled sharply but leaned in too, ever so slightly.

“When you save me, I’ll tell you,” Eliot promised him, barely a whisper as he spoke into the space between them. “I’m going to be so sorry, Q. I’ll tell you everything and beg you for a second chance because you were right, and I’d take it all back if I could.”

Quentin leaned his forehead against Eliot’s as he whispered, like it was simple, “You won’t have to beg.”

Eliot almost broke down then, but he leaned in instead, brushing his lips against Quentin’s gently enough that it barely qualified as a kiss. Quentin responded hungrily though as he grabbed Eliot by the shoulders and pulled him down to his height. Eliot squeezed his eyes shut and gave in without a fight. It wasn’t like he had the willpower to deny himself or Quentin this anyway. 

The kiss felt like an eternity wrapped up in the space of a heartbeat by the time they finally separated for air. They stayed in each other’s space for just a moment longer before Quentin let go of him and took a step back.

“Okay, I’m ready,” he said.

Eliot looked at him and nodded. He couldn’t say the same for himself, but he knew he had to be. He turned to do the final bit of spellwork and watched as the flames began to engulf the page. Before it could finish, he would have to leave, so that Quentin wouldn’t remember anything of his visit. Otherwise the memory spell would be pointless. So he walked to the door, feeling Quentin’s eyes on him the whole way, and paused to look one last time.

“I’ll see you soon, Q,” he promised him.

Quentin gave him the smallest of smiles and an endearingly sweet wave goodbye.

“See you, El,” he said.

Eliot smiled back at him over his shoulder and walked away.


	5. Chapter 5

Julia called the next day.

She’d asked to meet him alone, so he left Jade to marvel over the miracle of network television and made his way to a park a few blocks down the street. Julia was stretched out in the sun at a wooden picnic table when he got there, so he slid into the bench across from her.

She opened one eye at him and smiled. She seemed in good spirits at least, which had to be a good sign.

“Your plan worked,” she said, without preamble. 

“Thank god,” he exhaled. “What happened?”

She said, “Past you broke through last night just in time to have a weepy reunion with Q and Margo, and then the monster took over again. It was enough. We’re all hands on deck to get rid of him.”

“And Margo isn’t going back to Fillory?” he asked.

Julia shook her head. 

“I don’t think she’d leave New York now if you held a gun to her head.”

Good. That was good. One more thing moving in the right direction.

“I know you went to see Q yesterday.”

Eliot jerked his head up to look at her. He hadn’t been expecting _that_.

She asked, “I thought he wasn’t supposed to know you’re here?”

He opened his mouth to deny it, but she cut him off with a look that said not to even try. Instead, he asked, “How did you know?”

She said, “You were still wearing the necklace, dummy.”

She was grinning at him, and he shot her an unamused look. He’d never really been that close to Julia, but some new bond had clearly been forged between them, and oddly it felt as natural as joking around with a sister he’d never had. 

“Q didn’t say anything did he?” he asked. Because if the memory charm hadn’t worked...

She shook her head. 

“No, he just came home and stuck his nose in a book like usual,” she said, “until past you showed up, anyways.”

He admitted, “Okay, so I might have gone to see him, but I wiped his memory of it.”

She studied him with a curious expression.

“Then why did you go?” she asked.

He stared at the table between them as he thought over how to answer. Finally, he said, “Q was hurting. I wanted to help.”

When he met her eyes again, she was giving him a look like he’d passed whatever imaginary test she’d apparently been giving him. He just kinda shrugged at her, and she smiled.

“You’re also aware that Penny’s a psychic, right?” she asked.

He frowned at her, not at all connecting the dots between his answer and her follow up. He said, “Yeah, obviously.”

She continued, “So then you know he’s been reading Jade’s mind because she doesn’t have any mental warding.”

Oh.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yeah,” Julia replied, “and he’s been picking up on some really interesting stuff. Thought you might know something about it.”

He glanced over her shoulder as he answered, “Maybe.”

She sighed, and he looked back at her. 

“Who is she really, Eliot?” she asked. “Because she’s not some rando you picked up for this quest.”

“I’m not sure you’d believe me,” he admitted.

She quirked an eyebrow at him and said, “Try me.”

He sighed as he stared at her challenging expression. It’s not like she hadn’t already probably heard enough to piece it together if Penny had been reading Jade’s mind. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten to ward her.

“She’s my great great whatever granddaughter,” he answered with a wave of his hand, “from Fillory of the future.”

If Julia looked terribly surprised by that, she didn’t show it. She asked, “Do I even want to know how that happened?”

Eliot laughed. “Do you remember that quest where Q and I went back in time to get one of the keys?”

Her eyes lit up in recognition, and finally she started to look more surprised than smug. She said, “You mean the mosaic?”

He nodded.

“So when you say she’s your granddaughter,” she hedged, and he nodded.

“She’s mine and Q’s granddaughter from the mosaic,” he replied. “Turns out that timeline was more real than we thought.”

“Holy shit,” Julia breathed.

“Yeah,” Eliot replied.

She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked, “So, just to clarify…”

She trailed off suggestively, and Eliot laughed at the complete and total lack of subtlety.

“Her last name is Coldwater-Waugh,” he told her, “if that answers your question.”

“Yep,” she nodded, “that explains it.”

There was a beat of almost awkward silence before Eliot couldn’t help himself.

“She looks like Q, right?” he asked her.

“Oh my god,” she exhaled, like she’d been holding it in. “It’s creepy!”

Eliot laughed with her, feeling surprisingly lighter now that Julia knew the truth too. It was a fucking bizarre situation, but at least he wasn’t the only one in it now.

After they’d settled down over the Jade bomb, Julia told him, “We need to figure out what we’re doing now because Q and Margo are about to come undone, and the monster is getting antsy after yesterday’s mission didn’t work out.”

“Hm,” Eliot nodded. She was right, of course. Letting them know he was alive was only the beginning of everything that had to happen next.

“Got any helpful tips about that?” she asked him.

He really, really wished he did.

“Honestly, I’ve told you just about everything I know,” he said. “I suppose we could try and get our hands on the axes some other way, but…”

“Yeah, I don’t think axeing you in the gut should be our first plan,” Julia cut him off.

“Thanks,” Eliot grinned at her, “but it may still end up being our only one.”

Julia pursed her lips together as she stared out at the park. 

“There’s got to be a better way,” she mused. “Quentin wants to look at Brakebills.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Eliot said.

He wasn’t sure what could be there that they hadn’t found the first time around, but it was their best shot at any kind of research he supposed.

“Maybe me and Jade can start figuring out what Everett and the Library are up to,” he said. 

Julia hummed her agreement. 

“Penny can probably give you a ride.”

Eliot had told her what little he knew about the Library’s master plan, but mostly his knowledge was restricted to the context that it was part of Everett’s plan to become a god, given Everett’s role in everything else. It was genuinely such a big mess that he sometimes did worry that he was missing a vital piece of it. About once a day, he realized he was in over his head.

Julia interrupted his musing with another piece of the puzzle he’d barely even considered.

“I know this is probably a longshot, but you wouldn’t happen to know anything else about what I am right now, would you?” she asked. “You said I became fully human again in the end, but…”

He glanced over at her, and she looked a little sheepish as she trailed off, but he immediately felt gently chastised for not thinking more about her situation. So overwhelming was his own grief that it was easy to forget that others had lost a lot too.

“Not enough to be helpful, I’m afraid,” he told her, and the hopeful glint in her eyes started to dim back to resignation. “All I really know is that when they got the monster’s sister out of you, something went wrong, and you were stuck somewhere between goddess and human. Apparently the axe wound wouldn’t heal until you committed one way or the other.”

She nodded and stared at the spot where her feet were stretched out in front of her while she listened. Eliot hadn’t gotten the chance to notice how much her condition bothered her before, but he could see it now. 

“Wish I could figure out how to make that decision without being axed in the gut first,” she said.

Eliot laughed a little at that as he said, “I can relate.”

She gave him a dimpled grin and said, “Yeah, I guess you can.”

Then she said, “You’re probably not the person I should be admitting this to, but I can’t stop thinking about it even with everything else going on. I kind of wish I could take a day off from the monster situation and just try and figure it out, you know? But Quentin is so _obsessed_ with saving you that it’s hard to think about anything else when he’s in the room.” She paused. “That makes me pretty selfish, doesn’t it?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Eliot said after a moment.

He should probably be a little more critical of her wavering focus, as it was in his own best interest for her to be prioritizing his possession, but he couldn’t find it in himself to fault her. 

“I just feel so useless,” she admitted. “If I could be more than a glorified human shield, maybe I could do something more to _help_. I know Q would never say it, but I think he feels the same way.”

“Julia, you have to know you’re doing so much for him,” Eliot told her, and he thought she probably did know judging by the way she dropped her gaze and nodded. 

That wasn’t really the whole issue though, was it? He knew how things had played out in the version of events he’d lived, with her becoming human again and losing everything, but he thought he could maybe sense a little of the source of her present despair.

So, he asked, “What would you pick, if you got the chance to choose?”

She was quiet for a moment as she continued to stare down at her lap.

“I know what I think I should choose,” she said finally, “but honestly, I don’t know yet. We don’t even know if it’ll be up to me in the end.”

Suddenly feeling a heady conviction about it on her behalf, he promised her, “We’ll figure it out with the rest of this mess, and when we do, you’ll get to decide.”

She smiled up at him then, and he knew he’d said the right thing.

“We better get started then,” she said.

So just like that, they had a plan for the day at least. 

He collected Jade in the middle of her Friends marathon, and they hitched a ride with Penny to the Neitherlands Library. Eliot didn’t exactly have a good reason to be caught strolling in through the front door, so they’d been dropped off in a hallway somewhere in the dark recesses of the already creepy place to do their snooping.

“When you said we were going to the Library, this isn’t really what I pictured,” Jade muttered from beside him as they walked down the dimly lit, eerily white hallway.

Eliot snorted and glanced down at her.

“Yeah, it’s a little less friendly community hub and a little more authoritarian headquarters,” he said.

She asked, “What do they do here then?”

“The fuck if I know,” he admitted. “I got banned last time I was here, so I didn’t really get the chance to read the brochure.”

She gave him a half incredulous, half amused look as she asked, “How did you manage that?”

“I burned my ex-boyfriend’s book,” he said nonchalantly.

It was obviously a bit more complicated than that, but that wasn’t a particular memory he felt like diving into. The answer seemed to appease her though. 

Without missing a beat, she said, “That sounds oddly cathartic. Does everyone have a book here?”

He raised an eyebrow at her and said, “Easy, killer. You got an ex-boyfriend you’d like to set on fire too?”

“Ex-girlfriend,” she corrected him. 

“Oh,” he said, feeling a little dumbfounded. He recovered quickly though and said, “I can’t say I recommend it. It only felt good for a few seconds.”

“That’s okay,” she sighed, affecting what was obviously a faux disappointment, “I guess time traveling 300 years in the past to another planet is dramatic enough.”

“I’d say so,” Eliot agreed.

His curiosity was sufficiently peaked, but before he could ply her for more juicy details, they ran nearly headfirst into another person who was sneaking around the same hallway, only in the opposite direction.

“Fuck!”

There was a flash of platinum blonde hair in his vision as the person bent over and started picking up the stack of books she’d dropped. She wasn’t wearing librarian clothes, so Eliot didn’t figure they were in immediate danger, but he also realized about a second too late that he recognized that voice and that hair. Then she stood up, her arms full of books, and he saw exactly why.

“Eliot?” she asked.

Surprisingly, it was Jade who got around to speaking before he did.

“Alice?”

Alice turned to look at her, her eyebrows knitting together in clear confusion, and Eliot felt like his head was going to explode. Before any of them could say anything else, an alarm began to blare overhead.

“Shit, they’re coming,” Alice said. 

She took off down the hallway in the same direction she’d come from, and Eliot exchanged an extremely baffled look with Jade before picking up their pace too. Eliot got the impression that Alice didn’t entirely care if they were following her or not, but he felt compelled to do so anyways. Standing in the open with an alarm going off didn’t feel like the best of plans, and she clearly knew something about it. 

She didn’t seem to know exactly where she was going, but they ran through the winding corridor for only a few moments before she paused and darted inside an unlocked door. Eliot followed and watched as she tossed the books onto a nearby table and grabbed a chair to barricade the room. 

When she’d finished, he asked, “Uh, do you want to fill us in on what’s happening here?”

She straightened up and brushed her fingers through her hair as she surveyed her work, seemingly satisfied that it was secure. She asked, “What does it look like? They locked me up here, and I’m trying to break out.”

He raised an eyebrow at her surly tone, but then he remembered the Alice of this time was the one who had just betrayed all of them at Blackspire and tried to shut off magic forever. The unsteady, grief-fueled truce he’d formed with Alice of the future was decidedly not in effect at that moment.

“Why does this book say it’s Eliot’s?”

They both turned to look at Jade, who was rifling through the stack of discarded books on the table.

“Don’t touch that,” Alice snapped.

She quickly strode over to the table and pulled the books toward herself protectively. Eliot watched her, suspicion rising in his chest.

“You have all of our books,” he accused as he looked over the stack she was failing to properly hide, noticing Quentin’s at the very top with Margo’s underneath. His eyes narrowed as he stared her down. “Why?”

She huffed in frustration, like he was being deliberately dense, and said, “Because the Library is looking for all of you. I changed your books so they can’t find any of us when they realize I’m gone.”

“Oh,” he said, “that’s....surprisingly thoughtful.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, deadpan. Then she looked over at Jade and back at him as if something wasn’t adding up.

“What are you doing here?” she asked bluntly. “I thought you were possessed.”

He said, “That’s a long story.”

She squinted as she stared at him for another beat before suddenly her eyes lit up. She said, “Oh my god.”

She began scattering the books across the table again until she stopped on the one she was apparently searching for and looked between the book and Eliot. She brought her hands up to her face to form a window and stared at him through it with narrowed eyes.

“That’s it,” she breathed.

“What’s it?” he asked hesitantly.

She had this unnervingly manic sort of look in her eye as she pushed her hair behind her ear and held up the book she’d picked out.

“When I was gathering all of our books, I noticed yours had two volumes,” she explained. “I figured it was labelled incorrectly because it didn’t make any sense, but this explains it. You’re not you, not the you possessed by the monster anyways. So, the second volume,” she shook the book for emphasis, “is for this version of you because you’re our Eliot from the future, right?”

Among everything else Alice Quinn could be, Eliot sometimes forgot just how devastatingly smart she was.

“I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said no?” he tried.

She opened the cover of the volume and quirked an eyebrow at him. 

“It wouldn’t take me long to prove you wrong,” she threatened.

He conceded her point with an eye roll and a sigh.

“Yeah, okay, you’re right,” he said.

She only looked a little self satisfied as she closed his book again and sat it down. She asked, “Why?”

“Because things went really wrong,” he told her. “Future you knows I’m here and agreed with me doing this, for what it’s worth.”

Some of her resolve seemed to fade a bit as she took that in and stared at him thoughtfully.

“It got pretty bad then, huh?” she asked.

He nodded.

She asked, “Does anyone else know that you're here?”

“Just Julia and Penny,” he told her.

“Well,” she said, “I’m not sure I can help you with whatever you’re doing here because I’m sort of on the run, but we might be able to help each other out right now at least.”

“How so?” he asked.

“I’ve been studying the layout of the Library,” she said. “I could help you get where you’re going if you cause a distraction so that I can escape.”

It was more help than he’d bargained for when he’d set out on this mission blindly, so he said, “Deal.”

“Great,” she said. “Where do you need to go?”

“Wherever Everett is?” he said.

“That’s...probably not a good idea,” she cautioned him, “but I can get you to the administration center if that’s what you’re here for.”

“Perfect,” he replied.

He knew it wasn’t a great idea, but it wasn’t like he’d fucked off to the past with a well planned intinerary. His whole game plan mostly consisted of bad ideas.

So, Alice went over the directions for him on a piece of paper and detailed how to get through the posted security as the alarms continued to blare outside. With her side of the deal done, Eliot held open the door for her and waited for her to get a headstart into the chaos before he did his part. 

“How are we going to cause a distraction?” Jade asked him. “I’m still willing to set a book on fire, for the record.”

“Wards are tricky little things,” he said, looking through his fingers to analyze the one that Alice had tripped by removing the books. “If you change the parameters just a fraction…”

He used his telekinesis to pull at the delicate web until suddenly, there was silence in the halls. 

“There,” he said, “like nothing ever happened and no arson needed.”

They did their best to look inconspicuous as they turned and walked off down the hallway, and surely enough, the frantic workers slowly started to fade away, muttering about false alarms. It wouldn’t last forever, but he hoped Alice would at least have enough time to find her way out.

Her directions ended up being good, and they reached the administration part of the building with little difficulty. He knew they couldn’t blend in sneaking around like this for long, but they just needed to last long enough to find out something useful. Otherwise the whole trip would be pointless.

“We should wait for Everett. He’ll know how to…”

Eliot grabbed Jade and pulled her with him as he pressed himself against a bookshelf at the sound of Zelda’s voice. He held his fingers to his lips to tell her to be quiet and listen.

“He will agree with me that Alice Quinn was your project,” another voice said. “Holding her here was a mistake. We’re not jailers.”

Eliot realized at that moment that they already knew Alice was gone, despite his attempts to cover for her. That was concerning, but ultimately not really his problem. Then the room fell silent as someone else approached.

“That’s him,” Eliot mouthed to Jade as Everett passed.

Everett agreed with Zelda about Alice apparently once he’d given his two cents on the situation, but the debate about what to do with her still continued.

“We could read Alice’s book and find out her intentions,” Zelda suggested. 

“Alice’s book is in the revision room having the ending put in,” someone else argued, “which will take days.”

“Besides, we promised never to read someone’s book unless there was no other option.”

Eliot rolled his eyes as they parsed over the moral dilemma of invading someone’s privacy. Like the Library had ever given a shit about that.

“There might be another way,” Zelda cut in. “Tracking devices.”

Eliot leaned a little closer as he murmured, “Oh, here we fucking go.”

As far as he could tell, it sounded like they wanted to infiltrate the hedge witches somehow with some kind of tracking spell, in hopes that Alice would eventually run into one of them and tip them off about her whereabouts. It was admittedly a reasonable plan, but it still didn’t do much to explain what their end goal was, aside from apprehending Alice.

The meeting dispersed after that without much in the way of any new or helpful information. Eliot watched as everyone filed out of the room with a notable exception. Everett was still hanging back with one of the other men who had been in the meeting. They waited until the room had been cleared to speak.

“Those trackers,” Everett said. “They can do more than just alert us about a specific person, correct?”

“Yes, sir,” the man said.

“Good,” Everett replied. “We need to discuss a few modifications before putting them into circulation.”

The door to the meeting room was shut then, and Eliot could no longer hear what was being discussed. 

Jade cleared her throat from beside him.

“Uh, Eliot, someone’s coming.”

He straightened up and turned around just in time to see a short woman with round glasses and a stiff librarian uniform approaching.

“You are not authorized to be in here,” she said.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” he told her, holding up his hand placatingly. “We must have gotten lost. I was looking for the section on Ancient Egypt.”

She gave him a bored expression as she held out her hand and said, “Library card, please?”

“I left it at home?” he tried.

“If you don’t have a Library card, then you need to leave,” she said.

Eliot took a step back, nudging Jade along with him, and said, “I completely understand. We’ll just be going now.”

The woman stared them down as they backed down the row of shelves and then promptly booked it out of there. When Penny met them and dropped them off in New York again, Eliot was reminded of the Library’s fucky sense of time because it was already evening on Earth. 

“Julia is waiting for us in the hotel room,” Penny told them gruffly.

They were only about a block away, and Eliot wasn’t in the mood to pester him about his GPS accuracy, so they made their way to their destination without speaking much. He was thinking over everything he’d heard Everett say and just what he might be planning to do with the trackers when he caught sight of Jade darting off out of the corner of his eye.

“Jade, wait!” he called.

She did not, in fact, wait, so he sighed as he told Penny to hang on and followed her. She was running over to a woman who had tripped outside a corner store and spilled her bag of groceries all over the sidewalk. By the time Eliot got to her, Jade had already dropped to the ground and started picking them up.

“Thank you,” the woman breathed. “Silly, clumsy me.”

“It’s no problem!” Jade reassured her with a smile.

Eliot stood by as they gathered the last of the items and Jade offered a hand to help the woman up.

“I like your tattoo,” the woman said, looking pointedly at Jade’s wrist.

Jade replied, “Thank you! It’s new, but I think it’s growing on me.”

Eliot felt his hackles immediately start to rise at the look the strange woman was giving her. It could be a coincidence, of course, that she complimented the hedge tattoo. But it most likely wasn’t.

The woman pulled out what was unmistakably a dewey coin from her purse and handed it to Jade.

“Oh, you don’t have to give me anything,” Jade told her.

“I insist,” the woman said. “You’ve been very kind to me.”

Eliot kept a careful eye out as Jade took the dewey and pocketed it. This was officially no longer a coincidence.

The woman nodded at them both then and went on her way. It was a strange interaction to say the least, but Eliot supposed she could have just been a generous hedge witch. Still, he watched as she walked off until she disappeared around the corner, apparently not about to hex them or anything. 

By the time they made it to the hotel, Julia practically ambused them at the door.

“Where the hell have you been?!” she asked.

“In the Library,” he said hesitantly. “Why?”

She huffed as she said, “You would not believe the fucking day we’ve had.”

“I think I can take a guess,” he said.

“Alice showed up while we were at Brakebills,” she continued, and he nodded.

“Yeah, we ran into her too,” he told her. “What did she want with you guys?”

“Redemption apparently,” Julia scoffed. “Anyway, she and Q got into it, and Margo literally tried to stab her with an enchanted pen.”

Eliot couldn’t help the laugh that escaped at that. He didn’t necessarily have a personal grudge against Alice, knowing what he knew, but Margo had never been one to pull her punches.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” he replied.

Julia gave him a small conspiratorial smile as she continued, “I was considering helping her before Alice told us about the book.”

“What book?” Eliot asked.

Julia plopped down on the edge of the bed as Eliot made his way over to lean against the standard hotel desk. He raised an eyebrow at Jade’s immediate beeline to the coffee machine, which Jade deliberately ignored.

“Apparently she got some book from Plover that’s supposed to be able to tell you where you need to go or something,” Julia explained.

“Wait, rewind,” Eliot said as his gaze shot back over to her. “ _Plover_? As in?”

“Yeah,” Julia said. “Really makes you wanna trust her now, doesn’t it?”

“Jesus,” Eliot said. “So, what are you thinking about the book?”

Julia grinned at him as she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.

She said, “I’m thinking we use it to figure out where to find our answer for the monster problem.”

He frowned as he asked, “Do you think it works like that?” 

“I don’t see why not,” she shrugged. “Q and Margo are back at the penthouse working on the spell right now.”

“And where’s Alice?” he asked.

“Gone, hopefully,” Julia said. Eliot raised an amused eyebrow at her, and she sighed before giving an actual answer. “She and Kady took off to look into some hedge problem.”

“Ah,” Eliot replied.

Before he could give that odd pairing much thought, there was a yelp from behind him that caught his attention.

He turned around just in time to see Jade stumble as she caught her coffee cup.

“What did you just do?” Penny asked her, and his voice sounded alarmed.

“I,” she looked down at her hands and then back up at her cup. “I don’t know. I dropped it, and then all of a sudden it just like, flew back into my hand.”

She turned to Eliot with a confused expression, and he was struck with an idea. With his mind, he reached out for the cup and tugged it out of Jade’s hands. Just as he’d suspected, Jade reacted immediately and pulled the cup back up without touching it. He could feel her magic counteracting his own.

“Oh my gods!” she yelled.

She sat the cup down on the table and backed away from it, looking a little horrified as if it might explode any second.

“Jade,” Julia said carefully, “I think you just did magic.”

Jade looked at her and Penny with a still baffled expression, but then a smile quickly spread across her face as she turned to Eliot.

Her voice was filled with awestruck wonder as she asked, “I’m a magician?”

He felt a swelling of pride as he watched her realization.

“I think so,” he replied.

Her excitement was contagious, and Eliot grinned as she ran right at him and practically tackled him to the ground with a hug. He brought his hand up to pat her back and said, “I’m not surprised. You’ve got a fantastic bloodline.”

She pulled away, practically giddy as she stared down at her hands. 

“You have to teach me!” she exclaimed.

“I will, I promise,” Eliot laughed. 

Then, in the middle of all of their excitement, something strange started to happen. Eliot still had one hand on Jade’s shoulder, so she swayed into him as she suddenly lost her balance. 

He asked, “Hey, are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her face was becoming dangerously pale. “I feel dizzy.”

“Eliot, look,” Julia said.

She was pointing at Jade’s arm, and Eliot felt his heart drop into his stomach as he followed her gaze. There was a web of red lines spreading rapidly up her forearm, and Jade stumbled again as she noticed it too.

“What the fuck,” Eliot muttered.

Penny and Julia both stood up to get a closer look, but before they could, Jade collapsed. Eliot caught her just before she hit the floor and cradled her in his arms as he sank down onto his knees.

“Jade?” he asked. 

When he got no response, he reached up to turn her face towards him. Her head lolled into his hand, her eyes closed.

He yelled, “Jade!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry?


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel a little weird updating fics right now, but everyone needs a safe space to get away and recharge, and this is mine. black lives matter though, and if you're looking for ways to make a difference right now, feel free to reach out to me on tumblr (eliotapologist) and i'll share the resources i have. take care!!

Eliot looked up to meet Julia’s shell shocked expression and said, “Help me get her onto the bed.”

Julia cleared a spot for her and stepped aside as Eliot gently positioned Jade against the pillows. She was still unconscious, and Eliot was starting to freak the fuck out. 

All he could really think about was that she was his family. 

The word ‘family’ had always held such complicated connotations for him. He’d never felt any real loyalty to the people who shared his blood because they’d never been worth his time or love. However, there was one time when family hadn’t been complicated at all for him, and that was the time it was something that he and Quentin created together. They’d rewritten Eliot’s entire schema for the word over the years until it was unrecognizable in the very best way. His family with Quentin had become his whole world.

Jade was a product of that.

And she was very likely dying right in front of him when he’d barely even gotten the chance to know her. Before Quentin even got to meet her.

“Penny, go get Kady,” Julia said.

Eliot’s head snapped up.

“What?” he asked.

He’d nearly forgotten the two of them were there at all.

“The thing Kady and Alice were going to look into had to do with a hedge who’d collapsed,” Julia hurriedly explained. “Jade isn’t a hedge witch, but she’s got the tattoo, so if someone is targeting them…”

“I’m on it,” Penny cut her off, and then disappeared.

Eliot sat down on the bed next to Jade and brought his hand up to her neck, just to reassure himself that there was still a pulse there. There was, but it was weak.

“Julia,” he said without taking his eyes off of Jade’s face.

He didn’t know what the rest of that sentence was going to be, but he didn’t have to apparently. Julia walked over to him and squeezed his shoulder.

“I know,” she said. “She’s going to be okay.”

Her conviction was almost strong enough for him to believe it.

Kady and Penny appeared in the room probably less than sixty seconds later, but every second felt like an hour as Eliot sat and waited. 

“Move,” Kady said.

She pushed Eliot and Julia out of the way, none too gracefully, which Eliot would have complained about loudly under any other circumstance, but instead he stood and watched as she immediately started patting down Jade’s jacket and pockets. Kady covered her hand with her own jacket sleeve and reached inside one of Jade’s pockets to pull out the dewey Jade had been given earlier that day.

“This is it,” she said.

“A dewey?” Penny asked, a little incredulously. 

“Yup,” Kady said. “It’s cursed. I just got through pulling one off of a hedge who collapsed less than an hour after touching it.”

“What, so someone is cursing dewey’s now?” Julia asked. “Who would do something like that?”

“I don’t know who’s doing it,” Kady said, “but someone put a high level tracking spell on these. It marks you, and if you try to do magic, it tries to kill you.”

Eliot felt his blood start to boil as his awareness shifted from full on terror to processing the words that Kady was saying. He only had to hear ‘tracking spell’ to know exactly what had happened.

“It was the Library,” he hissed. “I was there earlier today, and they were talking about putting trackers into circulation with the hedge witches. They’re looking for Alice, but I don’t think that’s all they’re doing.”

Kady looked at him then, and he saw the moment she realized just who and where he was. Apparently that didn’t trump the information about the Library though because her face turned stone cold as she processed what he’d said.

“Those fucking assholes,” she said. “They don’t care who they kill as long as they stay in control of us all.”

Eliot felt incredibly justified by the anger her tone held but also very foolish. He’d sat and listened to Everett and Zelda come up with this plan, and he hadn’t realized. He hadn’t put two and two together when that woman handed Jade the coin. Of course hedges weren’t nice for the sake of being nice.

“Uh guys,” Julia said, “Jade still isn’t waking up.”

“Shit,” Eliot muttered. He looked back at Kady. “What do we do?”

“She’ll be okay now,” she told them, and Eliot let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, “but we’ll need to get some more salve for the rash on her arm. It works, but it won’t be cheap.”

“I don’t care,” Eliot snapped. “Get it.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Kady replied.

Her tone was somewhere between sarcastic and bewildered, but he wasn’t exactly in the state of mind to snap back. So, she and Penny took off again in search of the healing salve while he and Julia stayed and kept watch. Jade didn’t wake up before they got back, but she was starting to regain some of the color in her face. It wasn’t much, but any positive change was welcomed.

“Here, put this on her arm, and let her sleep it off,” Kady told him once they’d reappeared.

He took the small vial and examined it.

“It worked on Pete,” Kady said, probably sensing his hesitation.

Julia asked, “Pete?”

“Yeah, don’t ask. Long story,” Kady replied.

Eliot didn’t frankly know or care who Pete was, but he had no real reason not to trust Kady, so he did as she said. She also handed him a cloth bandage and a hefty bill from what looked to be a veterinarian, and he chose to question that later in favor of wrapping up Jade’s arm. 

“Hey, Eliot.”

He looked up once he’d finished to see Julia standing in front of him looking a little apprehensive.

“I really need to get back and check on Q,” she said apologetically. “The monster was gone when I left, but he and Margo were working on that spell, and if he comes back…”

“It’s okay,” Eliot told her. “Go. I’ve got this, and I’ll call you if anything changes.”

She nodded and reached out to squeeze his shoulder. Then she walked over to Penny, and they both looked at Kady. She wasn’t looking at them though. She was staring at Eliot.

“You ready to go?” Penny asked her.

“No,” Kady said. “You go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

Eliot raised an eyebrow at her but didn't question her declaration as Julia and Penny hesitantly agreed. And then it was only the two of them left in the hotel room, along with a sleeping Jade. 

Eliot didn’t have any sort of problem with Kady, and he was pretty sure she felt the same way about him. They’d simply never had a reason to interact from their opposite sides of the sphere that was their social group. That didn’t stop him from feeling a little intimidated under her willful glare though, which was saying something considering he’d once ruled a country and negotiated with opposing monarchies at the risk of his own life. 

“Do I need to be reviewing my battle magic or do you come in peace?” he tried.

She laughed a little at that and said, “Calm down, Waugh. This isn’t an interrogation.”

“If you say so,” he replied.

She sat down in the hotel room chair, and he leaned back on one hand against the bed he was sitting on.

“I’m sure there’s some fucked up explanation for why there’s two of you in this timeline,” she started, “but honestly, I don’t give a shit about that. You said the Library was behind the trackers, and I need you to tell me everything you know.”

Her brutally honest cut to the chase was a little refreshing, if Eliot was honest. He’d always relied on Margo for that kind of reality check when he needed it, and he missed her terribly now. Kady was hardly a substitute for her, but she had the same kind of fiery look in her eyes that pulled Eliot’s focus back to where it mattered.

“I heard them having a meeting earlier after Alice escaped,” he said. “The trackers were Zelda’s idea because she thought Alice would eventually run into a hedge witch and they would find her that way. After the meeting though, I heard Everett say he wanted to make some modifications to the trackers before they sent them out. They must have added the curse.”

Kady looked like she was practically vibrating with rage as she took in every word he said.

“Of course they did, because this was never about Alice,” she sneered. “They’re only after one thing, and that’s power over who has magic and who doesn’t. Taking the hedges out would mean one less obstacle for them.”

“That seems like a fair assessment,” he agreed.

She pushed her hair back away from her face as she leaned her elbows on her knees and sighed, “Damn it.”

Hesitantly, Eliot said, “There’s more that you should probably know.”

She looked up at him. 

“I’m listening,” she said, one eyebrow raised.

“This guy Everett,” he said, “he’s after a lot more than control over magic. He’s trying to become a god.”

Kady’s eyes widened briefly before she leaned back in her chair. She said, “Okay, now I’m starting to get curious about why there’s two of you and how you know all of this.”

He was already in deep enough that he might as well say fuck it to trying to be vague.

“Because,” he sighed, “I’ve seen it happen already. I’m sort of from the future of this timeline.”

There was a beat of incredulous silence.

“Well, shit,” Kady said. She only took a moment to process that before asking, “Then what’s his plan? How do we stop him?”

There was just something about her no nonsense approach that Eliot couldn’t help but admire.

“He’s funnelling magic from the fountain in Blackspire and storing it in Fillory,” he told her. “He plans to use it when the moment is right to harness the monster’s power and become virtually unkillable.”

“Fucking Fillory,” she laughed ruefully. “There’s always something.”

Despite being a former monarch of the place, he could only wholeheartedly agree with that statement.

She said, “I know the others are working on the monster, but is there a way to release all of that magic before he can get to it? And give it back to the people?”

“I’m not sure,” Eliot admitted, “but I do know that Zelda isn’t helping him. So maybe if you could get to her and convince her that he’s gone rogue, she could do a little recon from the inside?”

Kady hummed as she nodded her head. Then she said, “I’ll try that. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied. 

“And for what it’s worth,” she said, “I’m sorry you got possessed. That really sucks.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She nodded at him and rose from her chair, apparently done with the momentary sincere display of emotion. As someone who had never been very good at it himself, he could understand. It was actually sort of a shame that he’d never gotten to know her better. Maybe he’d still get the chance one day.

“Keep an eye on her,” Kady nodded at Jade. “She should be fine, but if she tries to do magic again…”

“Yep, got it,” Eliot replied.

Once Kady had gone back to whatever she’d been doing before they called, he settled in to wait for Jade to wake up. It only took one full episode of Friends before she started to stir.

Groggily, she asked, “What happened?”

Eliot hurried over to her bedside to urge her to lay back down.

“Hey, take it easy,” he said. 

Despite his attempts to keep her lying down, she slowly pushed herself up to lean against the headboard as she took in her surroundings.

“Congratulations on your introduction to magic being almost as traumatic as mine,” he told her a little sardonically. 

Her eyes widened.

“Oh my gods, I can do magic,” she said, as if the revelation was coming back to her.

“Yes, you can,” Eliot replied, still trying unsuccessfully to keep her from moving too quickly, “but you’re not going to right now because it might kill you.”

She looked down at her wrist then back up at him with a puzzled expression. She repeated, “What happened to me?”

“It’s the Library’s trackers,” he told her. “The coin that woman gave you was one of them, and turns out they’re cursed.”

“Figures,” she sighed. Finally, she leaned back into her pillows with a huff. “I’m a magician, but I can’t even use my magic.”

Eliot laughed and reached out a hand to ruffle her hair, which she swatted away petulantly.

“There will be plenty of time for that once all of this is over,” he promised her.

“Still not fair,” she pouted.

The frown on her face and the pinch between her eyebrows were so familiar that it made Eliot’s chest ache, and it also reminded him just how young she really was. Maybe he was biased. She wasn’t actually that much younger than him, after all. She was still fighting a fight that she didn’t deserve to die for though, and Eliot started to wonder again just how she’d ended up here and what they could hope to come out of it.

“We should probably talk about something,” he told her.

She glanced up at him, a slight curiosity replacing some of her disappointment.

“I know you’re a big girl who can make her own decisions,” he said, and there was that little frown again. Eliot laughed. “But I think it’s time we acknowledged that there may not be a way back home for you after all of this is over. I’m not even sure what’s going to happen to the future of Fillory and everyone you left behind, or to us for that matter.”

Her expression sobered a bit but then quickly hardened as she said, “I didn’t leave anyone behind.”

Eliot frowned at that.

“What about your family?” he asked. 

“My parents were loyalists,” she explained in a clipped voice.

“Loyal to the Dark King?” he clarified.

She nodded. She didn’t offer anything more at first, but when it became clear that Eliot was waiting, she sighed and said, “It wasn’t always that way. My father was part of the resistance at first, but my mother came from a family with royal ties. Eventually they both got brainwashed and pulled in too.”

Eliot felt a little breathless upon hearing that. He hadn’t really given much thought to where any of his and Q’s other descendants had ended up, but he wouldn’t have guessed loyal to a fascist regime as a likely option.

“They disowned me and my sister when we wouldn’t swear loyalty to the government,” she told him. “They wouldn’t turn us in, but they refused to protect us, so we left home. We were on our own for a couple of years before…”

Her voice cut off, and she pressed her lips together as she looked away. Eliot recognized that particular deflection. That’s why he knew that whatever she wasn’t saying was something she’d really rather not. 

“Before what?” he gently asked.

He also knew that even though she’d rather not say it, she needed to. 

“So, I met my ex-girlfriend in the resistance group that took us in,” she said quickly, like the words were burning her on their way out. “We were together for a year. Then there was this big uprising, and a lot of resistance members turned out to be undercover loyalists. She was one of them.”

Eliot sucked in a breath.

Jade continued, “She turned me and Aurora, my little sister, in. They came for us in the middle of the night with those horrible creatures.”

“Like the one from the mountain?” Eliot asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

He remembered the way Jade had skillfully slain the thing that had him pinned to the ground. She’d held her sword like someone who used it for a living. 

Her voice was trembling with anger as she continued, “I got away, but Aurora didn’t. She was only sixteen years old. I was supposed to _protect_ her.”

“Hey,” Eliot reached out and placed his hand on her arm, and she took a deep breath. “What happened was horrible, but it wasn’t your fault,” he told her. 

“It would have never happened if I hadn’t trusted the wrong person,” Jade argued.

“Yeah, well, we all make stupid decisions sometimes,” he said.

She gave him an incredulous look, so he told her, “My ex-boyfriend turned out to be a monster who tried to kill all of my friends. It happens.”

She stared at him for a moment before looking down at her feet, which were still stretched out in front of her.

In a quiet voice, she asked, “How do you live with something like that?”

Eliot exhaled. He’d done his fair share of dealing and not dealing with the aftermath of Mike. It had taken a not insignificant amount of time and the heavy weight of the Fillorian crown for him to find a reason to keep waking up in the mornings again. Maybe he still wasn’t the epitome of healthy coping mechanisms, but he had actually learned a thing or two since then. He cleared his throat.

“You forgive yourself,” he told her. She looked up at him, her eyes shining though her expression was still hard. He said, “It’s not your fault for believing someone is good. Believing there are still people worth trusting is one of the bravest things you can do in this world.”

He thought about Quentin and his endless faith in the goodness of others, no matter how much evidence he’d been given to the contrary. Eliot had never been like that. He thought of himself as a realist; someone who saw people for who they really were, not what he wished them to be, because giving someone the benefit of the doubt was how the bad people snuck their way past your defenses. It had never served him to assume that most people were good. Ever since his moment of reckoning in his happy place though, he’d been committed to trying out the whole bravery thing.

Jade didn’t quite meet his eyes as she nodded her head. He could tell that she wasn’t quite there yet, but she would be one day. There was too much of Quentin in her for her not to get there.

“Anyways,” she cleared her throat and jutted out her chin, “like I said, I didn’t leave anyone behind. Even if there was a way for me to go back at the end of this, I wouldn’t want to.”

Eliot would be a hypocrite if he didn’t understand that, given his own family he’d left back in Indiana. So, he nodded.

“Alright, well, we’re in this together then,” he told her. She smiled softly at that.

She said, “Good, because I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”

They weren’t left to their own devices very long before duty called again.

It came in the form of Julia nearly bursting down the door to their hotel room.

“What?” Eliot jumped to his feet. “What’s happening?!”

“We have a big problem,” she said, half out of breath.

She looked between him and Jade before continuing, “Margo and Quentin went to help the monster look for something at some museum, I don’t know, they were trying to distract him I think. Anyways, after they left, the spell for the book finished.”

“Okay,” Eliot said, “and?”

“And the book says that we need to go to the mirror world to defeat the monster,” she said.

Eliot staggered a little on his feet.

“Oh shit,” he said.

The whole point of this was to keep Quentin away from that place. Eliot was there to find another way, not to send him right into the clutches of the same world where he’d _died_. With Margo around this time, he knew she’d insist on going too, and that was just…. 

He felt like he might be sick.

“Eliot, are you hearing me?” Julia asked.

He swallowed and nodded.

“That’s not going to happen,” he said.

Julia exhaled heavily. She said, “No shit. That’s why I stole the book and came here before Q could see it.”

She held up the large book in her hand for emphasis, and Eliot noticed it for the first time. 

“Let me see that,” he said.

Julia walked over to the table and opened it up, and Eliot and Jade crowded around her to get a better look.

The only information it really provided was a glowing red dot over a location on a map, which was decidedly less than descriptive.

Eliot asked, “How specific was this spell? Do we know what’s waiting for us in there?”

Julia shook her head.

“I wish,” she said, “but apparently it’s a pretty archaic spell. I wanted to look into it more, but, well, you know Q.”

Eliot nodded, “He didn’t wanna waste any time.”

“Yep,” Julia said.

Eliot stared down at the book. If there was a way other than the axes for them to defeat the monster, they couldn’t afford not to go after it. But what if the people he loved walked into yet another trap and he failed his one chance to get it right?

He turned to Julia.

“Just how indestructible do you think you are?” he asked her.

She tilted her head as she looked up at him, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth.

She said, “I’m pretty sure the only thing that could kill me is a god.”

He asked, “Then how do you feel about accompanying me to the mirror world? No one else has to even know about it unless we actually find something useful.”

She closed the book and tucked it under her arm before turning to him and saying, “Let’s go.”


	7. Chapter 7

“I’m coming too,” Jade said.

Eliot turned around to look at her, and he said, “You absolutely are not.”

She placed her hands on her hips and glared up at him. 

“I thought you said we were in this together?” she challenged.

He asked her, “Did you forget that you almost died like an hour ago?!” 

She opened her mouth to argue again and so did Eliot, but Julia stepped between them, placing a hand on Eliot’s arm to silence him.

“We’re going to need someone on the outside in case something goes wrong,” she said to Jade. “Do you still have the necklace I gave you?”

Jade folded her arms over her chest and nodded.

“Good,” Julia said, “then you can be our backup and let Penny know if we need help.”

Jade didn’t look entirely satisfied with the plan, but she nodded anyways. She reached inside her pocket and grabbed the necklace, staring deliberately at Eliot as she slipped it over her head.

“You better tell me if you need help,” she said.

Julia promised, “We will.”

Jade walked away with a slight huff, and Julia grinned up at Eliot as she turned around.

“That was impressive,” he said.

She replied, “I’ve been best friends with Q since we were kids. You could say I’m an expert at handling Coldwater stubbornness.”

Eliot laughed out loud at that, which earned him a halfhearted glare from Jade over Julia’s shoulder.

He wrapped his arm around Julia and said, “You and I are going to be great friends after all of this is over.”

“We’d better be,” she shot back.

Getting to the mirror world was a lot easier said than done. They had to wait until the next day before they could do it without being caught by the others, so they parted for the night with a tentative plan in place. 

The next problem was enlisting the blood of a traveler for the spell. For all of Julia’s negotiation skills, Penny was a harder sell than Jade, and they actually did need his help.

“You want me to bleed out so that you two can go get yourselves killed?” he asked incredulously.

Julia promised him, “We’ll be fine. Neither of us is going to do magic. We’re just going to go where the book tells us to go and then come right back.”

“Yeah,” Penny scoffed, “because everything in our lives has been that simple.”

“Look,” Eliot said, and Penny did look at him but not happily. “I know it’s not an ideal situation, but would you prefer the alternative where Julia gets possessed and you have to stab her with an axe? Because as someone who was stabbed with an axe, this feels a hell of a lot better to me.”

Penny continued to scowl at him, but he did lose a little bit of his previous ire. Eliot had a point and they both knew it.

“You get fifteen minutes,” Penny said, “and then I’m dragging both of you out and sealing the door for good.”

Julia squeezed his hand and said, “Thank you, Penny.”

His glare softened as he looked down at her, but he still seemed concerned. Eliot couldn’t exactly blame him, but they didn’t have a lot of good choices. Sometimes you just had to pick the least crazy one and hope it worked out. That was exactly the emotion he felt as they set up the floor length mirror in the Brakebills lab to do the spell. 

Julia had assured him that Q, Margo, and the monster were busy and wouldn’t be back for awhile. Apparently they were in Ireland hunting down a leprechaun, which was just a lot to process, so he did his best not to.

Penny had to do his part first to open the portal on their side. When he was finished, they all stood at the entrance to the eerie looking mirror as if they were waiting for something.

Finally, Penny broke the silence.

He said, “Don’t screw up in there, okay?”

It was as close to outwardly caring about anyone as Eliot had ever seen him, and he honestly felt a little touched.

“We won’t,” he promised. 

Then he looked to Jade. 

“You’ll be able to see whatever we see with the necklace, so if things go sideways, get Penny and get the hell out,” he told her.

She nodded her head. He didn’t think she really understood the degree to which things could go badly in that place, and he was frankly okay with keeping it that way. She could read a room though. She rushed forward and squeezed him in a tight hug, and he returned the embrace. 

“Be safe,” she said when she let him go.

As he smiled down at her, he thought of a speech Margo had given him once.

_“When it’s be brave or be smart, you know which one, okay?”_

He did know, and he had every intention of being alive when they came out on the other side of this shitshow. So he gave her the most comforting smile he could manage.

Penny went through the mirror first, and Eliot and Julia followed. 

“Fifteen minutes,” he reminded them.

Julia reached up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. She said, “We’ll be back in ten.”

He gave her the tiniest of smiles in response, then turned around to continue the spellwork.

Julia had the book open in front of her, and the little red dot was glowing a moderate distance away from them. She turned in the direction it pointed and set out at a quick, deliberate pace. Eliot didn’t even think she’d stopped to look around, and he could kind of understand why. The mirror world was creepy as fuck, to put it mildly.

It looked like Brakebills, sure, but it was incredibly wrong. It was cold and desaturated. The atmosphere itself felt uninviting. 

“How close are we?” he asked Julia.

He was eager to spend as little time as possible in there. It was like the place itself wanted them to get out with its menacing vibes and the eerie echoes their voices made. Or maybe he just felt like that because he knew how dangerous it really was.

“I don’t know, it’s like the book keeps reorienting itself,” she said with a hint of frustration. She said, “I think it’s this place messing with the tracking.”

“Figures,” Eliot rolled his eyes. 

They continued walking though, occasionally adjusting their path as the book gave its directions in fits and starts. They only made it around a few more corners before the silence began to feel as oppressive as their voices had in the empty halls. Apparently Julia thought so too.

She said, “You know, pretty much everyone knows you’re here now.”

Eliot had been trying not to think too hard about that, if he was being honest. It was an understatement to say he’d failed at being subtle on this quest.

He replied, “The world hasn’t imploded in a time-altering paradox yet, so I guess we count ourselves lucky.”

She hummed in response, and then she got distracted with the book as the red dot disappeared again. She reached out her hand to stop Eliot as she waited for it to recalibrate. When it settled once again, she resumed her quick pace.

“I’m just saying,” she said, “that if everyone knows and nothing terrible has happened, I don’t see why we can’t tell Quentin what you’re doing. Or Margo, for that matter. I think they could use a little hope.”

Eliot didn’t answer her at first. He didn’t really know how to. 

Her logic was solid. It was pretty unlikely that the two of them knowing about his plan would change very much at this point. They were already unwittingly a part of it, after all. It might even be better if they did know because they were both definitely more cut out for this than him.

But he didn’t want them to.

Probably sensing that she wasn’t going to get an answer out of him, Julia said, “I think we’re getting close now. It looks like it’s in the Brakebills library.”

Eliot followed her in silence as they took another turn down another dark hall. After a few paces, he said, “I think I’m scared for them to know.”

She glanced up at him over her shoulder, and he stared straight ahead.

“Why?” she asked.

He swallowed roughly.

“Because,” he said, “if they don’t know what I’m doing, then they won’t know if I fail.”

It wasn’t a confession made lightly. He probably wouldn’t have even had the self-awareness to think the thought a year ago. He’d had more than a few come to Jesus meetings with himself since then though, and the problem with examining your own neuroses is that there are always more hiding underneath them.

“Or,” Julia said, “they’ll know that you cared enough about them to come up with this insane plan, even if it doesn’t work out.”

There was always that, he supposed. 

He countered, “Or the monster catches me with Q and figures out what we’re doing, and then we all die a gruesome death and he takes over the world.”

“The monster could find you with me too,” she pointed out.

He didn’t respond, and she looked up at him with a dimpled little smile. 

“That was a good excuse though,” she said. “A for effort.”

He kind of hated her a little bit for how right she was. Before he could say anything back though, the pulsing red dot on the book grew noticeably brighter.

Julia looked down at the book and then around them. They were standing right outside the library, just like she’d guessed.

“Whatever we’re looking for should be in here somewhere,” she said.

They closed the book and entered the room. The library wasn’t exceptionally large, but it wasn’t like they had literally any clue where to begin with their search. They decided to split up and look for anything that seemed different or out of place. It wasn’t exactly a promising venture considering everything around them was the same distressing shade of cold grey. 

Eliot decided after about five minutes of wandering through rows of bookshelves alone that he hated the mirror world. He’d thought he hated it before as a concept, but now that he knew what it was like to actually be there? The way it made you feel like there was something sinister always watching you, waiting around the next corner. The silence that hangs over you like a thick, suffocating blanket? 

He wanted to leave and never look back.

Everything looked so much the same as he meandered along that he started to zone out a little bit. His mind betrayed him as he thought, for one brief second, about the fact that this was the last place that Quentin had been alive. How this cold and desolate place had ripped the life out of the best person in the world and ended Eliot’s world right along with it. Then he immediately shook his head as he banished the very idea. _Not this time_ , he promised himself, and Quentin too.

He and Julia eventually met up again in the back of the room, next to a window that seemed to look out at absolutely nothing. 

“Any luck?” she asked.

He shook his head.

Then, inexplicably, something from behind them rattled. They gave each other what he could only assume were matching confused stares before turning around to see a cart piled high with books, which was shaking, violently. It looked like something was trying to escape from beneath the stack.

Eliot said, “I’m going to hazard a guess that that’s not normal.”

“Yeah, me too,” Julia replied.

She took a step closer to get a better look at it, but just as she reached out to move the books on top of the stack, they flew apart like a bomb had been set off underneath them. Books scattered across the wooden floor in all directions, shattering the oppressive silence, and Eliot had to dart out of the way of one particularly large volume. When the chaos had finally stilled, they looked down at the cart to see that one book remained.

Julia was still standing closer to the cart, so she picked it up and dusted off the cover.

She read the title aloud, “The Binder.”

She turned to Eliot, the book in hand, and said, “Think this is it?”

“I think that’s the only thing that’s looked remotely alive since we got here,” he said, “so the odds are good.”

Julia tucked the book under her arm along with the tracking book.

“Fifteen minutes is up!”

Penny’s voice was faint from how far away they must have walked but unmistakable in its impatience.

“We’re coming!” Julia called back.

They only spared one last glance around the room to make sure there was nothing they might have missed before getting the fuck out of there. 

They reached the portal in a hurry, but by the time they got there Penny’s blood was drying on the mirror, and he was starting to look a little shaky. 

“Did you find it?” he asked.

Julia nodded, “We think so.”

“Good,” he said, “then go.”

They brushed past him quickly and stumbled out of the mirror, practically tripping onto the floor of the Brakebills lab in their rush to get through. Penny was only seconds behind them as he sealed the portal. Eliot and Julia watched as he finally stepped through and allowed the mirror to fade back to its original form. 

They had time to let out a collective deep breath and enjoy the victory for about three seconds.

Then Eliot looked up and saw the reflection that was staring back at them in the mirror.

He and Julia both turned around to see Kady, Alice, and Zelda standing right in front of them. Jade was standing off to the side of the room, looking between the two parties uneasily.

Eliot cleared his throat, “We’ve really got to stop running into each other like this.”

It was his kneejerk reaction, to try and make light of any weird or awkward situation. No one was laughing though.

“Were you guys just in the mirror world?” Alice asked.

“Why do you care?” Julia shot back.

Eliot reached out to place his hand on her arm as if to say ' _easy_ '.

She brushed him off, but she did exhale slowly through her nose like she was telling herself to calm down. 

“I don’t care,” Alice replied, her own spike of defensiveness in her tone, “but we need that mirror to summon Harriet. She’s trapped in there.”

Eliot shot a quick look over at Kady, and she met his gaze with a short nod. It seemed Kady had found her leverage to enlist Zelda’s help after all. 

“Well, it’s all yours,” he replied. “We’re done here.”

Alice shifted her weight from one foot to the other a little uncertainly even as she pushed her shoulders back in response. She said, “Thank you.”

Eliot grabbed Julia’s hand to drag her along with him as he gave Alice and Kady a quick nod and brushed by them. He could hear Penny and Jade falling in step behind them, and he was frankly ready to just get out of there so that they could start figuring out what exactly they’d found with The Binder. It was more archaic bullshit, he was sure, but it had obviously wanted them to pick it up so there had to be something useful within its pages.

They made it out into the hallway, and Eliot felt himself begin to relax from the tension of that little confrontation. He didn’t know exactly when they had all stopped being able to be in the same room as one another, but that was a problem for them to tackle after they had saved the world. Again. Perhaps all that world saving had something to do with it, now that he thought about it.

They all began to relax as they made their way across campus to the wards that would transport them back into the city. Penny could have traveled them there, but by some unspoken agreement, they’d decided to walk. Maybe Penny and Julia were feeling some of the same lingering effects from that awful place as him. He felt like he kind of needed the warmth from the sun and the fresh air to bring himself fully back. The lifelessness that place held felt like it had seeped into his very skin.

They went straight back to the penthouse to study the book, mostly because they had no idea what to expect from it, and that place was warded to high heaven. The goal was to not unleash any kind of new horrors upon the world if they could help it. 

All four of them were dragging their feet a little by the time they reached the door, and there had been a consensus among the group to order pizza for dinner before any real research got underway. Well, Jade didn’t actually know what pizza was, but she was very excited about the concept. Eliot just happened to be at the front of the pack, so he did a quick unlocking spell and pushed the front door open. As soon as he took a step inside the apartment though, he froze.

There, leaning against the kitchen island, was Margo and Quentin, like they had been waiting for them. Margo had her arms folded over her chest and a smug smile on her face, and Quentin was fidgeting with his shirt sleeves where he stood next to her.

Jade poked Eliot in the side to try and get past him, and he stepped aside wordlessly, his eyes still honed in on the two of them. 

“Hi,” Margo said, her tongue in cheek smile lighting up her eyes. “Took you long enough.”


	8. Chapter 8

Jade had frozen in her tracks at the sight of them, and Julia and Penny seemed to have caught on to the situation as well.

“Don’t be mad,” Quentin said, holding out his hand as he took a step forward.

Eliot wasn’t mad. He was pretty sure he wasn’t even breathing. Margo took pity on him, as she often did, and pushed herself off of the counter to walk over to him. She paused right in front of him, a sort of proud yet undeniably genuine smile on her face.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she told him, “but first, you’re gonna hug me, you bitch.”

She flung herself into his arms, and he felt like the wind was knocked out of him as he caught her in a tight embrace. He’d missed her, _really_ missed her. They’d spent most of their time together after Eliot had woken up, but it hadn’t been the same. Some part of them was missing, and he’d started to think they might never get it back. It felt nice to remember that it hadn’t always been that way.

Quentin cleared his throat from behind her.

Eliot took a step back out of Margo’s arms and looked over her shoulder to meet his eyes. Quentin gave him a small smile and a little shrug, and Eliot felt his stupid heart skip a beat. One person really shouldn’t be able to have such an effect on him. It wasn’t fair.

“Hey,” he said.

Quentin replied, “Hi.”

The others picked up their own conversations around them, notably with Margo’s thinly veiled threat to Julia and Penny that they would talk later about why they’d been lying to her. Eliot’s world stood still though.

“So,” Quentin said, “I might have fucked up your memory spell after you left my dad’s house and then told Margo about it.”

Eliot stared at him for about one more second before he started to laugh.

“You little shit,” he said.

Quentin grinned at him, entirely unrepentant, and Eliot couldn’t even pretend to be upset with him. Instead he walked forward and wrapped his arms around Quentin’s shoulders, pulling him in close. Quentin wrapped his arms around Eliot’s waist and sighed as he snuggled up against his chest.

“Missed you,” he mumbled.

Eliot brought one of his hands up to the back of Quentin’s head and said, “Me too.”

There would be complications now, he knew. Eliot honestly didn’t care though. He was never going to the second he touched Quentin again.

Margo’s voice interrupted, none too delicately, “Hey, boys, if you guys are gonna make out, at least wait until we’re out of the room.”

Julia laughed somewhere to Eliot’s left as he and Quentin stepped apart. Quentin had a delightful blush spreading across his face as he cleared his throat and scratched the back of his head.

Eliot kind of wanted to tell the others to fuck off and leave them to it then, but that wasn’t the rational part of his brain talking. So instead he wrapped an arm around Quentin’s shoulders to walk them both back over to the group.

“So,” he said, “how about that pizza?”

There were about a million things to discuss and explain, but they all agreed to put a moratorium on the chaos until they’d ordered dinner. So, about half an hour later, the gang was gathered around several open pizza boxes in the living room, scattered in various positions across the sectional sofa. 

“Where is the monster right now?” Julia asked.

Eliot probably should have thought of that first, but he’d been only sort of distracted. 

Quentin piped up from beside him, speaking around a mouthful of pepperoni pizza, “Mesopotamia, apparently.”

From his other side, Margo said, “I thought that might keep him busy for a little while.”

“Well let’s hope so,” Eliot said, “because I do not intend to be here when he gets bored and comes back.”

Margo turned to him and asked, “Where have you been anyways?

“In a hotel a couple blocks away,” he said. 

She didn’t look too pleased by that, so he reached out to brush her cheek in apology and she slapped his hand away.

“No, don’t start that,” she said. “If you think we’re not gonna talk about why you didn’t trust me enough to help you with all this, then you are sadly mistaken.”

Julia spoke up, “To be fair to Eliot, he didn’t really tell me on purpose. I kind of tazed him because I thought he was a hedge witch hunting down Penny.”

“What?” Quentin asked incredulously, looking between her and Eliot.

Julia mouthed, “Sorry.”

She was laughing about it though, so it wasn’t too convincing. She said, “You should have seen the look on his face.”

From beside her, Jade was laughing too. She said, “It was pretty funny, even if it freaked me out at the time.”

“Traitors,” Eliot scoffed. “I regret introducing you two.”

Jade and Julia grinned at each other, and Margo watched the interaction for only a moment before setting her plate down on the table and leaning back into her seat cushions.

“Speaking of,” she said, and Eliot had a bad feeling about that tone. She continued, looking directly at Jade, “I don’t think we’ve been acquainted. My name’s Margo, and you are?”

Jade looked quickly at Eliot, and Julia raised her eyebrows at him too. He cleared his throat.

“Jade is a friend from Fillory who’s helping me,” he said.

Margo turned to look at him with a disbelieving expression, and he did his best to silently communicate _we’ll talk later_ with his eyes. She raised an eyebrow at him, her way of telling him that she was going to hold him to it, and then turned back to Jade.

“Alright, Jade,” she said, “if Eliot trusts you, then I trust Eliot.”

Jade gave her a relieved smile and said, “Thank you. I’m really happy to be here and help however I can.”

Margo eyed her a little suspiciously still but picked up her glass of water again as she nodded at her. Eliot risked a glance over at Quentin and noticed that his eyebrows were pinched together and his lips turned down in a frown as he stared at her, like he was trying to figure out a complicated puzzle. 

Eliot knew he had to tell him who Jade really was. Probably, he needed to tell him sooner rather than later because it wasn’t fair at all for Eliot to be the only one to know. She was just as much Q’s family as she was his, and the two of them had been avoiding eye contact all night as they kept sneaking glances at each other. Eliot just had to get over himself and rip off the bandaid.

He cleared his throat as he stood.

“Q,” he said, “do you wanna help me clean up the dishes?”

Quentin startled a little bit as he looked up at him before nodding his head and standing too.

“Uh, sure,” he said.

They gathered empty plates and pizza boxes from the table and made their way into the kitchen. They could still hear the group chatting from behind them, but the distance allowed for some measure of privacy at least. Eliot sat his stack of dishes down in the sink before taking Quentin’s and doing the same. He had no intention of actually doing the dishes. Someone else could handle that part.

“This is bizarre,” Quentin said.

Eliot turned around and leaned against the sink to face him.

“Yeah, it is,” he agreed. 

Quentin pushed his hair behind his ears, a nervous habit from when his hair was longer, even though there was barely enough of it now for it to be very effective. He said, “I just, I wish you would have let me help you with whatever you’ve been doing with Jules and Penny.”

“I wanted to,” Eliot told him. He really did. He’d wanted to be with Quentin since the moment he’d landed in this timeline’s past, but that was sort of the problem. He said, “I guess I thought I was helping you more by not involving you and Margo, in case things went wrong. It sounds stupid, I know.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Quentin said. 

He took a step towards Eliot and stopped, like he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d been planning to do. Eliot held out an arm, and Quentin hesitated for only a second before walking up to him so that Eliot could pull him into his side.

“We’re gonna fix this, Q,” he said. 

It was a promise he couldn’t truthfully make, but he was going to do his best to keep it anyways.

“I know,” Quentin mumbled. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

Eliot leaned down to press a kiss to the top of his head and said, “Me too.”

He was stalling, and he knew it. He allowed himself one more moment though to appreciate Quentin pressed up against him before he leaned back, keeping an arm around his shoulders.

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” he said.

Quentin looked up at him curiously, and Eliot fidgeted with the sleeve of his shirt with the hand that was still touching him.

“Jade isn’t just a friend from Fillory,” he admitted.

Quentin glanced towards the living room, where they could still just see Jade sitting next to Julia and laughing at something Margo said.

“Alright,” Quentin said, “who is she then?”

Eliot looked back at him and said, “Her last name is Coldwater-Waugh.”

Quentin’s head snapped back quickly enough to give him whiplash as he asked, “Wait, what?”

“Yeah,” Eliot said, “trust me, I thought I’d finally lost it when she told me too.”

Quentin glanced quickly between Jade and Eliot a couple more times. He looked slightly like he might be about to start flashing an error 404 screen in his eyes.

“I don’t,” he said, “I mean. What?”

Eliot grinned at him and let go of his shoulders to lean back against the countertop again. 

He said, “There is a fuck ton of time travel involved in this story, but the short version is that Fillory ended up 300 years into the future after everything went down with the monster. I was there hiking up a mountain with Alice when...”

Quentin shot him a skeptical look, so he said, “Again, long story, but Jade saved my life and then immediately proceeded to tell me that I had sent a letter to our family hundreds of years in the past asking for their help. Basically, we have our grandkids and the clock dwarves to thank for my time traveling abilities.”

He pulled the watch out of his pocket, where he’d been keeping it since he last used it.

Quentin stared at the watch incredulously, and Eliot couldn’t blame him. He was sort of still reeling over the logistics of it himself.

“Did the clock dwarves make that? Like the one they made for Jane?” he asked, and Eliot could see the nerdy freakout coming on. 

He handed the watch to Quentin so that he could get a better look and said, “Yeah, something like it. It doesn’t create time loops though. It just sent me here.”

Quentin smoothed his thumb over the CW carved into the front reverently before handing it back to Eliot.

“Anyways,” Eliot said, “she’s our great great times ten or something granddaughter from the future. She’s here with me right now because she’s related to you and couldn’t mind her own business when there was a quest to go on.”

Quentin looked up at him with a dumbfounded expression, and Eliot reached out to brush back his hair that had already fallen. He said, “Say something, please.”

Quentin swallowed and his eyes started to glisten as he looked up at him. He said, “El, our family was real.”

Eliot grinned. He said, “Yeah, Q. They are.”

Quentin looked back at Jade again, and Eliot caught her eye as she not so subtly glanced at them. He waved her over, and she rose from the couch and started to walk their way.

“You’re going to love her,” he told Quentin. “She’s just as stubborn as you are.”

Quentin looked like he was fighting back tears as he laughed in response to that. He stood up straighter as Jade reached them, and Eliot said, “Jade, this is Quentin. Quentin, Jade. I’m just, going to leave you two to talk.”

He squeezed Quentin’s shoulder once and smiled at Jade on his way out of the room. Once he reached the entrance to the living room, he paused and looked back at them. He felt like his heart was going to melt right out of his chest at what he saw. The two of them were hugging, with Quentin’s face buried in her shoulder and his eyes squeezed shut. Eliot smiled and turned back to join the others. 

Margo was looking at him like she wanted to eat him alive for details, and he tried to force some composure back into his walk as he approached his spot next to her on the couch. He’d tell her everything, but Quentin deserved that moment first. There would be time for the rest of it later.

Because of all the surprise revelations and then a persistent child monster following them around the next day, they unfortunately didn’t really get around to addressing The Binder for another two days.

Finally though, Margo and Penny ended up god knows where on babysitting duty with the eldritch terror, which thrilled them endlessly, so that Eliot, Julia, Quentin, and Jade could dig into what they’d found back at the penthouse.

The four of them were gathered around the kitchen island with the book on the counter between them.

“I guess we just open it?” Quentin said.

Julia reached out tentatively and flipped open the cover, revealing a tapestry of archaic looking symbols on the first page.

She asked, “Does anyone recognize this language?”

“No,” Quentin said, leaning in to get a better look. “It’s definitely not a language anyone has ever written about, if that’s what it is.”

He started flipping through the pages, which only seemed to hold more of the same. Suddenly though, he yanked his hand back and said, “Fuck! Papercut.”

He held his finger up to his mouth, and Eliot reached out to take the book from him. He said, “Here, let me look at it.”

Quentin brought his hand back down to the pages so that he could push it in Eliot’s direction, but when he did, the book slammed shut on his fingers. He yelped and pushed the book away quickly with his other hand at the same time as Eliot grabbed it and pulled it off of him. Once his hand was free, Quentin said, “I think that book just bit me!”

They all looked at him incredulously and then back down at the book. Everyone stared at it for a few quiet seconds like it might lash out again if anyone touched it, but that wasn’t going to get them very far. So, Eliot reached out and flipped it open again, pulling his hand back quickly.

Something was different. The swirling symbols were gone, and in their place was a faint line of red ink.

“Oh my god,” Julia said. “That writing wasn’t there before, was it? I can barely make it out, but it looks like…”

“It’s written in Q’s blood,” Eliot finished.

“Yeah,” Julia agreed.

The implications of that settled in amongst them, and it became clear to all of them at about the same time that they were going to need more blood if they wanted to figure out what the book was trying to tell them.

Quentin was still looking extremely pitiful with his papercut pressed tightly to his mouth and his puppy dog eyes on display. Eliot was skipping over Jade on principle, considering she was cursed and all that. With those options ruled out, he turned to look at Julia. She was already looking at him.

He exhaled heavily as she batted her eyes up at him. Then he groaned.

“Ugh, fine,” he said, “but why is it always me who has to get their palm sliced open on these little quests?”

“Practice makes perfect?” Julia tried.

He scowled at her, and she had the decency to look apologetic as she opened a kitchen drawer to hand him a knife. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes as he sliced the blade across his hand. Quickly, he dropped it onto the kitchen island and held out his closed fist over the book. As his blood dripped onto the page, more words began to appear. Julia leaned around him to read it.

“It looks like a spell or an incantation,” she said.

Quentin leaned in too, still clutching his wounded finger, and said, “It’s in Latin.”

The words stopped appearing, so Eliot pulled his hand back and turned around to rinse off the cut. Once he’d removed the blood, it was easy enough to do the only minor healing spell he’d ever actually memorized to speed up the repair of the torn skin. It was more of a bandaid than a healing spell, but it worked.

“Well, I can’t cast,” Julia said.

Quentin picked up the book, holding it in front of his face, as he said, “Here goes nothing.”

He read out the incantation, and Eliot waited with baited breath as nothing happened for a second. Then the book began to shake, rattling the chair Quentin was sitting on, and he tossed it away from himself. It landed on the countertop, and they all jumped back as the pages began to rip open. From the gaping tear, a whole hand emerged, which was a lot to take in, but it was also followed by an arm and then a head.

“Jesus Christ,” Eliot said.

He reached for Jade, placing her behind him as he took a step back and watched in horror as a grown man climbed out of the book and jumped from the island onto the ground.

No one said anything. What do you even _say_ to the man who just ripped open a book and climbed out of it in front of you?! They all waited with matching shocked expressions to see just what they had summoned. The man rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck before looking around at all of them. Then he spoke.

“And the Binder stood before them, and as they stared, eyes full of wonder, the Binder thought to himself…” he looked over his shoulder, directly at Julia, as he said, “took you long enough.”

Their dazed silence continued for about three more seconds before Julia asked, “What?”

The strange man began to pace, clasping and unclasping his hands, as he said, “The Binder knew Julia had many questions. She’d been searching in vain for how to reacquire her divinity. He knew the answer. The Binder explained he had answers, but it would require they learn how he came to be.”

Eliot raised an eyebrow as he looked first at Quentin and then at Julia.

She opened her mouth and closed it again before saying, “I have been searching for that, yes,” she said, “but I thought you were supposed to help with the monster?”

“The Binder knew about the monster, and he asked that Julia remain patient and allow him to explain,” he said.

“Okay then,” Julia said, “I’m all ears.”

The Binder walked over to the center of the living room. The four of them looked at each other, and Jade asked, “Should we be following him?”

“I guess,” Quentin replied.

So they all went after him, settling on the sofa in front of him, and waited.

With his booming, dramatic flourish, he said, ““The Binder’s story began in a place known simply as... a Library.”

“You were a Librarian?” Julia asked.

He nodded and continued, “He was studying the limits of power. His specialty was the magic inherent in Gods. The Binder had a theory. When a being of great power, such as a God, is killed, their energy is lost, but he believed it could be preserved by binding it to an object. That object, in turn, could be bound to a magician of sufficient training and preparation, effectively turning the magician into a god.” 

“But,” Quentin interrupted, glancing at Eliot and Julia, “when we killed a god, all of magic got shut off.”

The Binder turned to him with a slightly condescending smile and said, “The Binder politely reminded Quentin that not every story is about him.”

Eliot buried a laugh as Julia hid her smile behind her hand. Quentin frowned and said, “I didn’t say it was.”

Eliot patted his arm and said, “It’s okay, Q. We think you’re important.”

He rolled his eyes at Eliot before settling in again to listen.

The Binder said, “He continued. It was a problem that perplexed The Binder and his fellow Librarians, but, as it turned out, the Old Gods themselves provided a solution. Two siblings. Mistakes. Born with the power of many gods. They were created with one unique quality that made them essential to this experiment. They could not die.”

Eliot whispered, “The monster and his sister.”

“Wait,” Quentin turned to him, “who said anything about a sister?”

“Yeah, that’s a thing unfortunately,” Eliot told him.

Quentin mumbled, “Great.”

“So if they couldn’t die,” Julia said, “then it wouldn’t trigger the Old Gods to take away magic.” 

“The Binder told Julia that she was correct. Without fear of the Old Gods’ retribution, the Librarians were safe to move forward with their experiment,” he said.

“And this experiment, it was done on the sister, right?” Eliot asked. “Because that’s who the monster is trying to resurrect.”

The Binder stared at him for a moment before turning on his heel and walking towards him until he was standing uncomfortably close. Eliot flinched back a little as he bent down and leaned in to look at him.

“The Binder saw that Eliot was not in the correct time,” he said quietly. He stared directly into Eliot’s eyes for a few very weird seconds before standing up again and saying, “The Binder realized that Eliot’s body had housed the younger sibling and survived. He was in awe of the strength that such a feat must have required.”

Eliot swallowed and nodded. He said, “I did do that. I’m actually trying to use a little less strength this time around.”

“The Binder could understand why Eliot might wish to do so,” he said, rubbing his hand along his chin and turning around to pace the other direction again. “The Binder could help, but it required they hear the rest of his story.”

He looked over at them, and Eliot gestured for him to get on with it then. He really was losing patience for this whole thing, if he was honest. He’d heard Tick get to the point faster in a council meeting.

The Binder said, “The younger sibling was left to wander alone and confused while the older one, the sister, was split into four parts. Each part bound in a stone. Each stone bound in a Librarian.”

Julia interrupted, “Bacchus. Iris. Heka. Aengus.” 

“Holy shit,” Quentin breathed, “the gods the monster has been trying to hunt down.”

“When they were finished, the Binder came to regret what he had done,” he hung his head before continuing, “but the new gods he had built were afraid of him. He alone held the secret that could make them human again. And so, they cursed him.”

“They turned you into a book,” Jade said.

She’d been listening quietly to his explanation, unlike the others who kept interrupting to ask questions, but she had that righteous fury and empathy in her tone that Eliot had come to expect from her as she verbalized her realization. Leave it to her to find a reason to feel bad for the weird stranger in their living room.

The Binder nodded.

“The Binder was hidden in the mirror world, where the new gods hoped no one would ever find him again,” he said, “until word reached The Binder of Julia Wicker and her quest. He knew he had the answers she sought.”

“The answers about my godhood?” Julia asked. She glanced at Quentin before saying, “I was asking about saving Eliot when we did that spell. I thought that’s why the book sent us to you.”

He smiled, “The Binder reminded Julia that she did not understand how all things were connected.”

Julia’s eyes widened and she blinked as she replied, “Julia reminded The Binder that he was kind of being a dick.”

Eliot full on laughed at that, and Quentin cleared his throat as if he were trying to bring them all back to order. 

“What does that mean?” he asked. “That all things are connected?”

“The Binder could take Julia in either direction, godhood or humanity,” he said, not really answering Quentin’s question. “The choice was hers. Either road would be painful. He wondered aloud if she was ready.”

Julia stuttered a bit as she said, “You and me both.”

The Binder stood in front of them with his hands folded like a patient professor, waiting for her to answer his question. In his silence though, the others were reeling.

Eliot said, “You don’t have to do anything right now.”

She looked over at him, her expression still lost. 

“This is good news though, right?” Quentin asked her. “You finally have a way to become a goddess again like we talked about.”

Eliot raised an eyebrow as he looked at her. He hadn’t remembered that part of the conversation when Julia was telling him how worried she was about her condition. Perhaps judging by the look on her face, he wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines. Her expression hardened a little bit.

“That’s not what we talked about,” she said.

Realizing he’d misstepped somewhere, Quentin hurriedly said, “Jules, I didn’t mean…”

She stood up from the sofa and brought her hand up to her temples, rubbing at them like she was getting a headache.

“I know what you meant,” she said, “but I just. Need a minute to think about this.”

Eliot wasn’t going to be the one to tell Julia Wicker what she should or shouldn’t do, so he shot Quentin a look as he started to argue. Quentin seemed to understand, and he simply sighed instead as Julia walked out of the room and started up the stairs.

“I’m gonna go talk to her,” Jade said.

Eliot looked at her and nodded. If anyone had a chance of Julia not biting their heads off, it was probably an innocent bystander like her. So she rose from the sofa and followed, which left only Eliot and Quentin alone with The Binder.

“The Binder could see that she needed time to decide which way to go.”

Quentin cleared his throat and looked back at him.

“Um,” he said, “you can go now or, whatever it is you do. I think we’re good here for now.”

“The Binder could sense that his presence was no longer wanted,” his tone held a surprising amount of sass for the emotionless way he spoke, “The Binder went away to wait for Julia’s decision.”

Eliot and Quentin both watched incredulously as he wandered off. 

Eliot said, “The third person, past tense narration thing has really got to stop. It’s creeping me out.”

Quentin snorted next to him before sighing and leaning back into the sofa cushions. His shoulder brushed against Eliot’s as he settled in.

He said, “So, that happened.”

“Yeah,” Eliot said.

“I knew Julia was worried about the goddess thing,” Quentin said, “but I didn’t think she’d freak out about it like that. She’s been talking about becoming a goddess again so much that it seemed like she’d made up her mind.”

Eliot stared up at the ceiling of the penthouse as he thought back to their conversation in the park.

“I think she’s conflicted,” he said. “She knows being a goddess would help everyone else, but she’s not sure if that’s what she really wants for herself.”

Quentin turned his head on the sofa to look at him, and Eliot glanced over to meet his gaze.

He said, “It’s kind of weird that you and Julia are friends now.”

Eliot laughed. He asked, “Are you worried we’re gonna gang up on you?”

“Maybe a little,” Quentin admitted.

Eliot grinned at him, and Quentin smiled back. During moments like these, Eliot could almost forget that this wasn’t just his life. The past version of himself that was running around terrorizing humans and gods alike didn’t feel real when he was just sitting on the couch joking around with one of his oldest friends.

Gently, Quentin asked, “Are we ever gonna talk about it?”

Eliot looked back up at him and asked, “About what?”

Quentin gave him a lopsided smile and said, “You know what.”

Eliot had a pretty good idea what, and he wasn’t, actually, planning to talk about it. He didn’t even know where to begin. Quentin seemed to take his silence as a ‘no’ though, and he looked down at the sofa cushion between them as he attempted to brush his hair over his eyes. It was too short, but the gesture hit Eliot like a knife to the chest as he thought about the last time he’d seen Quentin hide from him like that.

“We don’t have to,” Quentin said, “It’s just, when you were helping me with my dad’s stuff, you said…”

Eliot cleared his throat and looked down at the floor.

“I know what I said.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before Quentin looked back up at him. He said, “You just didn’t think I would remember it. That’s why you said it.”

The thing that hurt the most about Quentin’s accusation was that he was right. Eliot _had_ planned on Quentin forgetting that whole conversation. He’d planned on letting his past self handle the big emotional stuff once they were reunited, and Eliot was going to get out of this part. The part where he had to be the one to not push Quentin away when it mattered most. 

“Q,” he said, “I wasn’t lying about any of it. I am going to want to tell you everything after you save me.”

“You just don’t want to tell me right now,” Quentin surmised.

He was starting to get irritated, and Eliot couldn’t blame him. He was fucking this up, just like last time. Quentin scoffed and shook his head as he looked past him.

“You’re unbelievable,” he said.

Eliot forced himself to look at Quentin as he said, “You don’t know what happened in my timeline. We weren’t…”

Quentin turned back around to face him.

“We weren’t what?” he asked. 

Eliot had to think carefully about how he was going to answer that. He wasn’t going to tell Quentin that he’d died saving him, leaving Eliot alone in his regret. There was no way he was going to even let him get the idea. So instead, he went for the lesser of the two heartbreaks and said, “You got back together with Alice before you saved me.”

Quentin gave him a disbelieving look as he asked, “Are we really arguing right now about something another version of me did?”

Eliot laughed out of pure frustration and scrubbed a hand down his face. His grief-colored glasses had allowed him to forget how frustrating arguing with Quentin could be.

He said, “I’m just saying that if you did it before, then how do I know that’s not what you really want?”

Quentin maintained direct eye contact as he asked, “You mean when I have a choice? Because it doesn’t feel like you’re giving me much of one right now.”

Ouch. Eliot deserved that. He really did.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

Sounding frankly exhausted, Quentin asked, “Then what did you mean, Eliot?”

Eliot replied, “I meant that even though it was another version of you, it was still the same you from this same point in time, and you obviously still had feelings for her.”

“I still have feelings for you!” Quentin half shouted. He was clearly getting heated as he continued, “Who cares if, in another life, I got back together with my ex-girlfriend because I thought you didn’t want me? I can’t speak for what I was feeling then, but in this life, I told her a week ago that we were done, and I haven’t changed my mind about that.”

He stared at Eliot hard, challenging him to argue, and Eliot… well, he had to admit that Quentin made a good argument. He’d given Quentin no good reason to sit around waiting for him last time around, and it would have been pretty selfish for him to get upset that he hadn’t. But Eliot had always been a little selfish about the people he loved, if he was honest. 

The truth was, watching Alice grieve over Quentin like she’d been the only one who really had the right had taken a toll on Eliot. It hurt to know that Quentin had chosen her, because it meant that Eliot’s pain was automatically seen as lesser even though it was eating him alive. What good would it have done for him to make the truth about them known though? The only person who needed to hear it was dead. 

He hadn't even told Margo. It sort of felt like the private knowledge of his own ‘what if’s’ was all that he had left of him and Quentin, and maybe he’d internalized that more thoroughly than he’d thought.

It had felt easy to think of what he would have done differently or might do one day if he got another chance, but those chances had never really seemed plausible. Now that Quentin was sitting right here in front of him, practically begging Eliot to believe him, he realized just what a terrifying thing that truly was.

He’d promised though.

“You’re right,” he said quietly. “Of course you’re right, Q. I’m sorry that I’m fucking this up again.”

Because Quentin had no idea about the dark places Eliot’s mind had just gone, he gave him a small smile as he said, “You are kind of being an idiot right now.”

“Hey,” Eliot said, his tone full of faux offense.

He loved him so much.

He nudged Quentin’s knee fondly with his own, and Quentin grinned at him. 

In a quiet voice, Quentin said, “I meant it when I said you wouldn’t have to beg for another chance. If that’s what you actually want.”

“I meant it when I said I would,” Eliot replied, just as quietly.

“Well you don’t have to,” Quentin said, then he amended, “unless you start trying to push me at Alice again, and then you’re gonna have to do a lot of begging.”

Eliot laughed at that, and he said, “That seems fair.”

“Good,” Quentin replied.

As Eliot looked at him and his kind smile and soft eyes, a slightly hilarious thought occurred to him. He grinned at him, and Quentin smiled back as he asked, “What?”

Eliot said, “You do realize that you’re gonna have to have this whole conversation with past me again once this is all over.”

Quentin rolled his eyes and groaned, just a little theatrically. He covered his face with his hands and said, “God, why do I love such a ridiculous man?”

A bright and warm feeling spread through Eliot’s chest, and his smile grew wider. He reached up to pull Quentin’s hands away as he leaned in. He said, “I love you too.”

Quentin opened one eye to look at him, and Eliot brought one hand up to swoop his thumb across Q’s cheekbone. Quentin smiled that lazy, dorky smile he got when he was really, _really_ happy, and Eliot silently swore to never take for granted that he was lucky enough to know what that smile looked like.

He leaned in further, intertwining his and Quentin’s fingers with one hand and cupping his face with the other, and Quentin met him half way in a sweet and slow kiss. Eliot sighed happily as Quentin brought his free hand up to bury it in his curls. He’d missed this. He’d known that intellectually, of course, but none of his memories compared to the real thing that was having Quentin’s lips under his own and his hands on his skin. 

When they finally pulled away, neither of them went very far. Eliot adjusted his body to allow Quentin to practically burrow into his side, and he wrapped his arms around him once he’d settled. Tomorrow they’d have to deal with Julia’s existential crisis and saving the world, but Eliot was happy to make this moment last as long as possible.

He felt, for the first time, like maybe they could actually do this. Or maybe he just felt like they had to.


End file.
